Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The major contribution of Jane Webb (later Webb Loudon) to the Romantic period was her futuristic novel, The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), which places her beside Mary Shelley as one of the foundational writers of science fiction. Later, after her marriage to the prominent landscape gardener and horticulturalist J.C. Loudon, Webb Loudon would become the leading writer on gardening and horticulture for women and children in the early Victorian period. She helped to make gardening a vocation for women of her generation and might well be considered the first professional woman gardener and writer on horticultural topics. With these two phases in her writing career, Jane Webb Loudon stands as a significant contributor both to the development of scientific and futuristic fiction and to women's writing and experience in the nineteenth century. Jane Wells Webb was born on 19 August 1807 in Birmingham. Her father was a successful Birmingham businessman and Webb grew up in a prosperous and educative household. Her mother died in 1819 when Jane was only 12. Seeking solace, her father took her travelling for a year on the Continent, a journey that in interesting ways parallels those of her future husband J.C. Loudon in 1813–14 and again in 1819. While in Europe, Jane began writing poems, affectionate pieces addressed to her father that would later be published in her ... log in or subscribe to read full text