Mary Delany, born Mary Granville, was an inventive woman. Through ingenuity and resourcefulness she made the best of a poor start in life and a dismal, semi-forced first marriage to an elderly husband, Alexander Pendarves, who died leaving her less well off than her relatives had expected. She and her friend Lady Charlotte Finch were both acquainted with marital distress. Finch's marriage to the Honourable William Finch produced four children and had at first been companionable, but shortly after her appointment as royal governess in 1762 he became mentally unstable (he died in 1766) and is said to have been violent towards her. So she left him for a life shared between Kew and an apartment at St James's, and a career caring for two families of growing children, her own and the queen's. A historian might hesitate before connecting her husband's illness with her demanding employment at court, but a novelist need not be so circumspect.
Mary Delany, who remained childless, remarried happily some twenty years after her first husband's death, but by this time she had developed her own skills and interests, as well as a distinctively independent attitude to the social whirl. She had a keen (and often satiric) eye for fashion and display, which she loved to describe in vivid detail; fabrics, trimmings, patterns and colours ('scarlet damask, gold tabby, pale lemon lutestring, silver frosted tissue, mouse-colour velvet') glow and sparkle and flutter under her pen, and she was full of advice to country cousins about ribbons and gloves. (She would certainly have advised Alison Uttley and Auntie Phyl that ribbons for the elderly were not a good idea. She had strong opinions about ribbons.)
Mary Delany first came to the notice of the royal eye at Queen Caroline's birthday celebrations in 1728, where she made (in her own words) a 'tearing show', like a jay in borrowed feathers, in jewels borrowed from Lady Sunderland and a gown she had designed herself. 'The Queen thanked [Lady Carteret] for bringing me forward, and she told me she was obliged to me for my pretty clothes, and admired my Lady Carteret's extremely; she told the Queen they were my fancy, and that I drew the pattern.' But Delany, much as she loved clothes, was also a true mistress of the half-arts. She took up the crafts of japanning, shell-work and cut-paper-work, creating from simple and largely inexpensive materials objects of great and sometimes lasting beauty.
These pursuits were popular with many aristocratic women, some of whose skills went well beyond the conventional needlework, bag-making and knotting that helped to kill time. Charlotte Boyle, credited with 'real genius' by Horace Walpole, ambitiously covered the wall panels of a room at Boyle Farm, Thames Ditton, with black Japan-work (verre eglomisé) using lampblack and goldleaf applied to glass with isinglass. Elizabeth Vesey at Lucan House in Ireland decorated her dressing room with 'Indian figures and flowers cut out and oiled, to be transparent, and pasted on her dressing-room window in imitation of painting on glass'. Delany, who helped her friend Mrs Vesey with this task, thought it had 'a very good effect'.
Delany herself was, however, the most innovative of all. Germaine Greer in The Obstacle Race (1979) generously described her as 'the most civilised person in the most civilised era of English culture', and listed with admiration her prodigious activities, which included 'the making and sticking of pincushions, Japan-works, pastel portraits, copies of great masters, designs in shell-work, lustres, candelabra, cornices and friezes in cut-paper on wood, chenille work, cornices made of shells painted over like fine carving, upholstery, quilt-making, embroidery, cross-stitched carpets, miniature playing-card painting'. Delany worried that her mind was 'too much filled with amusements of no real estimation', a characteristically self-deprecating view that women tended to take (and still take) of crafts that cannot be dignified with the name of art. Late in life, she wrote to her niece Mary:
Now I know you smile and say what Can Take Up So Much Of A.D.'s [Aunt Delany's] time? No children to teach or play with; no house matters to torment her; no books to publish; no politicks to work her brains? All this is true but idleness never grew in my soil, tho' I can't boast of any useful employments, only such as keep me from being a burthen to my friends, and banish the spleen.
(Greer, in a not uncharacteristic volte-face, seems somewhat capriciously to have turned against Delany since she wrote The Obstacle Race, complaining in the Guardian in 2007 that she ought to have learned how to paint instead of wasting her time in cutting up paper. This article provoked predictable indignation in twenty-first-century women artists who work in patchwork, needlework and the soft arts, a spat that reminded me of that large, American, feminist, mixed-media artwork, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, collaboratively created in 1974–9. I saw it in a warehouse in Islington. It was interesting but ugly. The delicacy of its needlework was not its distinguishing feature, whereas the delicacy of Delany's work is undisputed.)
Delany was modest about her achievements but, while it is true that her name is not registered in the ranks of the great masters that she copied, her creativity and originality were fully recognized in her lifetime. It is agreed that her finest works were the paper collages of her old age, made after the death of her second husband Dr Delany in 1768. She began this extraordinary composite work in 1773 or 1774, when she was in her seventies, producing over nearly ten years a 'Flora Delanica', consisting of a series of nearly a thousand exquisite, delicate and botanically accurate, closely observed series of cut-paper mosaic flowers. These remarkable artefacts, which are as beautiful, fresh and natural as they are ingenious, were made by a process of her own devising, which portrays each flower as though it were alive upon its stem. They are, it must be admitted, in a different league from Auntie Phyl's gummed elves.
Her flowers were admired for their artistry by Reynolds, and for their accuracy by Joseph Banks and Erasmus Darwin. Queen Charlotte (who loved Delany and signed herself in letters to her as 'your very affectionate queen') plied her with rare specimens and praise, and presented her with a beautiful, gold-spangled, satin pocket case containing, as Delany's waiting-woman put it, 'a knife, sizsars, pencle, rule, compass, bodkin'. Her mosaics were miracles of craftsmanship. Her 'Burnet Rose' (Rosa spinosissima), with its delicate white and cream flowers, has a stem showing sixty-five thorns, cut in one piece with the stem, and her 'White Flowering Acacia' has literally hundreds of leaves cut in different shades of green. The simpler flowers – the Chinese lantern, the marsh vetch, the corn poppy – are also very beautiful. She wielded her scissors with genius. Occasionally she would incorporate a part of a real plant – a leaf, a floret, a seed pod—in a collage. All this creative activity can hardly be dismissed as time-wasting, although it was certainly time-consuming.
It seems far from impossible that Mary Delany might have hit spontaneously upon the puzzle principle, so adept was she at the arts of dissection and reassembly, of combining and re-creating, of making something from almost nothing. Maybe she and Lady Charlotte Finch discussed these matters as they watched the royal children play at Kew. Maybe, as Shefrin suggests, 'future research will reveal yet another, earlier inventor'. Dates are set to be challenged. Historians love to bowl them over, one by one: 1760, 1759, 1758... How far back in time may the dissected puzzle be traced? And how far, and how quickly, did it travel?