Event Details

In which ghosts, plants, queer theory, and ecocriticism converge in a shadowy forest…

In which ghosts, plants, queer theory, and ecocriticism converge in a shadowy forest…

In this paper, novelist and academic Dr Nat Reeve (University of Exeter) will explore the queer potential of supernatural encounters in a plant-based ecosystem, as depicted in Victorian art and poetry. Elizabeth Siddal’s painting The Haunted Wood (1856) and poem ‘O silent wood I enter thee’ (undated) will be considered alongside the ghostly landscapes, eerie plants, and Spiritualist ecologies of artists Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Anna Mary Howitt.

The talk draws on material from Nat’s PhD, Queer Reading the Work of Elizabeth Siddal, and on archival research from their Amy P. Goldman Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship at the University of Delaware and Delaware Art Museum.

Dr Nat Reeve (he/they) is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, a published novelist, and an academic working in Victorian Studies. Nat has an AHRC TECHNE-funded PhD in English from Royal Holloway, University of London (2023), and their debut novel Nettleblack was published by Cipher Press in June 2022. In academical guise, Nat’s also been the Amy P. Goldman Pre-Raphaelite Fellow (University of Delaware and Delaware Art Museum) and the Co-Director of the Royal Holloway Centre for Victorian Studies, and has published essays on Siddal and queerness in Word & Image, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (both 2022), Art UK, and Tate Etc (both 2023).