'Not Strictly Proper For A Female Pen': Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Sexuality of Botany

Abstract

Examines the adaptations of Carl Linnaeus' "Systema Naturae," which introduced a new classification system of plants based on a sexual system of botany, by William Withering, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward. Use of botany not only for conservative but also subversive social and political ends; Fear by moralists that descriptions of the promiscuity of plant life might offend female delicacy; Withering's disguise of the sexual character of the Linnaean classes and orders.