Marianne LEE A Quiet Tide, Dublin: New Island Books, 2020
Ellen HUTCHINS (1785-1815)
‘Ireland’s first female botanist and talented botanical artist
Ellen’s story is of a remarkable young woman botanising in a remote and beautiful corner of Ireland – Bantry Bay, West Cork – in the early 1800s, and the legacy she left. In just eight years of botanising, cut short by her death aged 29, Ellen Hutchins discovered many new species, and made a significant contribution to the understanding of seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts.’ (https://ellenhutchins.com/)
Based on the life of Ellen Hutchins, Marianne Lee’s first novel A Quiet Tide immerses readers into the extraordinary intellectual and artistic life of a woman who was long regarded as an ordinary and sickly young lady. In her novel, Marianne Lee bravely recreates Ellen Hutchins’ creative energy, generosity and determination as she challenged her fate in her small corner of the world in Bantry Bay (co. Cork). But Marianne Lee also portrays various ways of embracing the natural world at a time when science meant progress for some, but seemed far apart from vernacular practices and forms of empirical knowledge as experienced by others for centuries. For many reasons which have to do with gender, social norms, or the political context of the time, Ellen Hutchins stood at the intersection between a men’s world and female domesticity, the world of science and the world of mundane down-to-earth daily experience. Marianne Lee’s novel carries readers away into Ellen Hutchins’ world, the variety of her experiences with the more-than-human world, in her garden, by the sea, with the servants in her house, the peasants on the beach as well as with famous scientists of the time.