SOURCE: Milne, Anne. “Gender, Class, and the Beehive: Mary Collier's ‘The Woman's Labour’ (1739) as Nature Poem.” Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8, no. 2 (summer 2001): 109-29.

In the following essay, Milne examines the cultural significance of the figure of the beehive in a number of eighteenth-century texts, particularly focusing on “The Woman's Labour,” which she views as both sociology and poetry.

The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about and with a gross rusticity admire his workes; those highly magnify him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

—Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643)

This paper looks at the cultural meaning of the beehive in eighteenth-century Britain as it is represented in a selection of literary and non-literary texts. The text at the centre here is Mary Collier's...