Professor Stephen Bending

• Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Garden History and Landscape Studies

I have recently completed a monograph on British, French, and American gardens in the period between the creation of Versailles and the decay of Monticello. Published by Yale for the Paul Mellon Centre (forthcoming 2027), and entitled Pleasure Gardens and the Problems of Pleasure, the book reimagines pleasure gardens of the long eighteenth century as highly charged spaces in which beauty, emotion and intellect coincide and collide. Emphasising landscape as experience, and the garden as a place in which experience is heightened by expectation and design, the book explores the pleasure gardens of Britain, France and North America across the long eighteenth century. It reveals that, despite shifting fashions and national styles, gardens consistently provoke delight, unease and a powerful struggle to understand and express the nature of pleasure itself. Focusing on pleasure’s disruptive nature, the book examines the conflicts between public statement and private experience, placing intellectual and sensual pleasures in the context of the Enlightenment’s struggle to account for the immediacy of sensation and the unruliness of emotion.

Alongside this, I've recently written on Jane Austen and Gardens; and on plants and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. with Stephen Bygrave, I continue to edit the Chawton House series of early women's writing; and I am on the editorial board of a number of journal and publication series, including Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.