Reinterpreting Marianne North: life writing, botanical travel, and the legacies of empire

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The reputation of Marianne North (1830-1890) rests largely on two projects completed in her final decade: the unique public gallery she established at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (designed to permanently display her botanical oil paintings and wood specimens), and her posthumously published life writing. This study aims to reinterpret these projects - North's work as a traveller, writer, artist, and gallery maker - by taking their colonial, intellectual, and social contexts as a key focus. In so doing, the study will examine the curatorial and historiographical challenges of narrating the life of a remarkable individual while at the same time engaging explicitly with the ways race, colonialism, class, and gender structured both the production of her work and its representation. In foregrounding issues of race, empire, and the colonial labour that enabled North's travels, the project will contribute to a wider (re)evaluation of Kew's colonial heritage and help inform plans for the gallery's reinterpretation. The project's findings will, through collaboration with non-HEIs such as the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), help to inform wider discussions among heritage organisations about how most appropriately to negotiate legacies of imperialism in their collections.