page_title: Maria Elizabetha Jacson
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Maria Elizabetha Jacson / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Title Page of Sketches of the Physiology of Vegetable Life, 1811. Maria Jacson
context_page_description: Maria Elizabetha Jacson was an eighteenth-century English writer, as was her sister, Frances Jacson, known for her books on botany at a time when there were significant obstacles to women's authorship. In some sources her name appears as Maria Jackson, Mary Jackson or Mary Elizabeth Jackson. She spent most of her life in Cheshire and Derbyshire, where she lived with her sister following her father's death.
  Social conventions of the time obliged her to publish anonymously. She was influenced by Erasmus Darwin at a time when the new but controversial sexual classification of plants proposed by Linnaeus was becoming known in England. She published four books on the topic.
context_section_description: Maria Jacson showed early signs of gifts in relation to botany, through drawing, horticulture and plant experiments. Darwin describes a drawing she made in 1788 of a Venus fly-trap, stating that she was "a lady who adds much botanical knowledge to many other elegant acquirements". Maria Jacson, who was part of the first generation of women science writers, is known for her writings on botany. Her publisher placed a commendation by both Darwin and Boothby ("so accurately explaining a difficult science in an easy and familiar manner") amongst the prefaces to her first book, Botanical Dialogues (1797) written at the age of forty two, which was well received. Darwin also recommended Maria's work in his Plan for the Conduct of Female Education of that year;
  But there is a new treatise introductory to botany called Botanic dialogues for the use of schools, well adapted to this purpose, written by M. E. Jacson, a lady well skilled in botany, and published by Johnson, London.
  However the book did not pass beyond a first edition, possibly because it was too advanced for the young audience for whom it was intended.
  For this reason she reworked the material into a more adult format in Botanical Lectures By A Lady (1804). She described the latter as follows "a complete elementary system, which may enable the student of whatever age to surmount those difficulties, which hitherto have too frequently impeded the perfect acquirement of this interesting science".
  She was familiar with the Lichfield Botanical Society's translation of Linnaeus' System of Vegetables (1785), for which she intended her Botanical Lectures as an introduction, but in a society that disapproved of female education, and in particular the new sexual classification of plants, she trod warily between the Linnaeans and contemporary propriety. She completed three books on Linnaean botany and plant physiology and a fourth on horticulture. Her Florist's Manual went into several editions. In her writing she faced two important obstacles, the backlash against educated women as typified by Richard Polwhele and his hostile satirical poem The Unsex'd Females (1798) and the moral concerns of a society that felt that such a delicate matter as the sexual reproduction of plants was inappropriate matter for 'female modesty' to be exposed to. Her sexual politics is evident in her resistance to Linnaeus' primacy of male sexual features in his classification system, emphasising that the female pistil is of equal importance to the male stamen.
  Given the constraints on women writers of the times her books were published anonymously 'by a lady' but the introduction of Botanical Lectures is signed with the initials M.E.J. At the very end of the third edition (1827) of Florist's Manual, appear the words "Maria Elizabeth Jackson, Somersal Hall, Uttoxeter, Staffordshire." Since this contains a number of errors, it is possible it was added by the publisher.  The first edition ends with "M.E.J., Somersal Hall". Her earlier writing was very much under the influence of Darwin, however her Sketches of the Physiology of Vegetable Life (1811), marked a new independent direction, which she illustrated with her own drawings.
  Her appreciation of the constraints placed on women writers was apparent, even in her first book, where she wrote that women must
  avoid obtruding their knowledge upon the public. The world have agreed to condemn women to the exercise of their fingers, in preference to that of their heads; and a woman rarely does herself credit by coming forward as a literary character.
  She carefully ascribes the norms she describes as those of the 'world' rather than herself, but steps back from challenging them, by advising her daughters of the dangers of being known for what you know.
caption: Title Page, Sketches 1811
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