Pleasure Gardens and the Problems of Pleasure:
From Versailles to Monticello via Strawberry Hill

This book reimagines the pleasure gardens of the long eighteenth century as highly charged spaces in which beauty, emotion and intellect coincide and collide. 

Emphasising landscape as experience, and the garden as a place in which experience is heightened by expectation and design, this book explores the pleasure gardens of Britain, France and North America across the long eighteenth century. It reveals that, despite shifting fashions and national styles, gardens consistently provoke delight, unease and a powerful struggle to understand and express the nature of pleasure itself. Focusing on pleasure’s disruptive nature, the book examines the conflicts between public statement and private experience, placing intellectual and sensual pleasures in the context of the Enlightenment’s struggle to account for the immediacy of sensation and the unruliness of emotion. 

Familiar sites such as Versailles, Vauxhall, Strawberry Hill and Monticello are explored as well as little-known gardens like Park Place, Kalorama and Moulin Joli. Canonical male writers are discussed, including Walpole and Gilpin, Mollet and Dezallier, Jefferson and John Adams, but they are considered alongside women with quite different views, ranging from Elizabeth Montagu through Madame Roland to Jefferson’s highly articulate granddaughters. Juxtaposing sources from disparate but interconnected nations, spanning canonical works and unpublished manuscripts, this book offers a fresh new history of gardens and of garden experience.