ISSUE 7.2 (SUMMER 2011)   ‘An Old Vagabond’: Science and
Sexuality in Marianne North’s Representations of India  By
Eadaoin Agnew, Kingston University, London   “There is nothing
politically innocent about a nineteenth-century British woman
painting rare tropical flowers and writing about her
experiences. But there is nothing politically simple about it
either” (Morgan Introduction xxxvii).   <1>Susan Morgan’s
insightful remark concerns Marianne North (1830-1890), a
nineteenth-century female traveller who employed the world’s
flora and fauna as a means of visually and textually re-
imagining herself. In an effort to address the complexities
alluded to by Morgan, this paper explores North’s intensely
vivid depictions of the natural world and suggests that these
depictions bring to fruition the diverging aspects of her
ambition in landscapes beyond the physical and ideological
borders of Victorian Britain. On one hand she strives to become
part of the British scientific establishment; but on the other
hand, she