Prof. Melissa Zeiger (Dartmouth College, USA): “'No weeds, no toil, no curse': Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Garden Politics in Opus 7” 

November 2026 (online) - the exact date will be announced soon

In writing what she calls “a truthful pastoral” in her long narrative poem Opus 7, centered on the impoverished but almost miraculously generative gardener Rebecca Random, Sylvia Townsend Warner produces a sly review of earlier, religiously based garden writing. She refers most clearly to the garden passages of Milton and Marvell, with glances at the garden in Genesis. Those examples offer her the solidity of a powerful literary past--and literary colleagues. At the same time, the poem’s recurrent critique involves the central Judeo-Christian myth of the apple eaten in Paradise, in the story that shows humankind condemned to expulsion and, relevantly for this story of a female gardener, blames the first woman. Notably, however, Rebecca’s garden all but exiles the apple tree. Unlike stories of Paradise, her plot flourishes without what Warner refers to as the “[p]rohibition in the first-devised garden”: “no weeds, no toil, no curse” (161). Warner critiques the authoritarian, militaristic, hierarchical, and masculinist version of belief in such garden ideologies and offers instead a magic of the biosphere—“a pulse, a stroke, implicit in [Rebecca’s] grubbing paws, that woke the dreaming seed”: a different supernaturalism.

MELISSA ZEIGER is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College the author of Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (1997). She is a distinguished teacher with a special interest in contemporary poetry, AIDS and Breast Cancer Literature, women's fiction and Feminist Criticism, but has also published on Victorian and Modernist poetry. Her current research projects focus on the garden/gardening in American literature and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.