SOURCE: Snyder, William C. “Mother Nature's Other Natures: Landscape in Women's Writing, 1770-1830.” Women's Studies 21, no. 2 (1992): 143-62.

In the following essay, Snyder contends that the picturesque movement provided particular intellectual opportunity for women artists, Wordsworth among them.

In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the merging of two concurrent phenomena—the solidification of picturesque values and the proliferation of women artists—yields an imagery that resists seeing Nature as Mother. Progressive women artists at the end of the century and even through Romanticism tend to limit mothering impulses to human expression, while rendering external Nature as multifaceted and integrative, patterned but not personified. Individualized re-creation of a Nature mystically charged with fertility may have been brilliance of a kind, but as this new sensibility replaced the insistent patriarchism of the neo-classical style, the female was no less marginalized, fit to the role of praiseworthy Mother. Thus...