Jane Wells Webb Loudon (19 August 1807 – 13 July 1858) (also known as Jane C. Loudon) was an English author and early pioneer of science fiction. She wrote before the term was coined, and was discussed for a century as a writer of Gothic fiction, fantasy or horror. She also created the first popular gardening manuals, as opposed to specialist horticultural works, reframing the art of gardening as fit for young women. She was married to the well-known horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon, and they wrote some books together, as well as her own very successful series.
Early life
Jane Webb was born in 1807 to Thomas Webb, a wealthy manufacturer from Edgbaston, Birmingham and his wife. (Sources vary on her place of birth: according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), she was born at Ritwell House, which is possibly the same as Kitwell House at Bartley Green). After the death of her mother in 1819, she travelled in Europe for a year with her father, learning several languages. On their return, his business faltered and his fortune was lost to excessive speculation. He sold the house in Edgbaston and moved to another of his properties, Kitwell House at Bartley Green, six miles away. He died penniless in 1824, when Jane Webb was seventeen.
She would come to have three major, and contrasting, intellectual achievements. She explored cultures and gained familiarity in several languages, which would benefit her later on in her travels. At age 20 she would publish the first fictional book about mummies, which introduced a new genre to fiction. Finally, after her marriage to horticulturist and landscape designer, John Loudon, she changed to botanical writing. Jane became responsible for introducing gardening to middle-class society through her easy to understand gardening manuals. She was a pioneer as a woman to make botanical information accessible to those outside the field, and to further her ideas and her output in society, she became a self-taught botanical artist.
Works of fiction: The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
After the death of her father, she began to support herself by writing. Her first publication was a book of poetry, Prose and Verse, that was published in 1824. After this, she changed to fiction with her best known work, The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, published by Henry Colburn as a three-volume novel, as was usual in that day, so that each small volume could be carried around easily. Loudon states, "I had written a strange, wild novel, called The Mummy, in which I had laid the scene in the twenty-second century, and attempted to predict the state of improvement to which this country might possibly arrive." Her final works of fiction were Stories of a Bride, published in 1829 and Conversations on Chronology(1830).
She may have drawn inspiration from the general fashion for anything Pharaonic, inspired by the French researches during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt; the 1821 public unwrappings of Egyptian mummies in a theatre near Piccadilly, which she may have attended as a girl, and very likely, the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. As Shelley had written of Frankenstein's creation, "A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch," which may have triggered her later concept. In any case, at many points she deals in greater clarity with elements from Shelley's book such as the loathing for the much-desired object, the immediate arrest for crime and attempt to use lies to escape arrest. However, unlike the Frankenstein monster, the hideous revived Cheops is not shuffling around dealing out horror and death, but giving canny advice on politics and life to those who befriend him. In some ways The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century may be seen as her reaction to themes in Frankenstein: her mummy specifically says he is allowed life only by divine favour, rather than being indisputably vivified only by mortal science.