Noting in her introduction that nature is a fraught and contested term, Norbury takes a loose approach, all in service of pushing back against the fact that “what we think of as nature writing has been associated almost exclusively with men.” The essays, fiction, and poetry that follow thus reflect a wide range of views, and while many selections are contemporary, the historic range is also broad, including contributions from of Julian of Norwich on the Garden of Eden, Margery Kempe on a storm at sea, and a striking snippet of visionary nature writing by Thomasine Pendarves.

From the fourteenth-century spiritual revelations of Julian of Norwich to the seventeenth-century travel journals of Celia Fiennes, and including a host of twenty-first-century voices such Sarah Evans, Sinead Gleeson, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Rachel Lichtenstein, Amy Liptrot, Helen Mort, Anita Sethi and more, Women on Nature presents a fresh vision of the natural world and is of unique importance in terms of women's history and the history of writing about nature.Norbury ( The Fish Ladder) assembles an entertaining and eclectic anthology of nature writing by women about the “east Atlantic archipelago” or British isles. Katharine Norbury has sifted though the pages of women's fiction, poetry, biography, gardening diaries and recipe books and garnered accounts from artists, farmers, theologians and natural scientists to demonstrate the multitudinous ways in which women have observed the world about them.

Alongside the traditional forms of the travelogue, the walking guide, books on birds, plants and wildlife, Women on Nature embraces alternative modes of seeing and recording that turn the genre on its head. This anthology gathers the voices of women from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries whose subject is the natural world in Britain, Ireland and the outlying islands of our archipelago. There has, in recent years, been an explosion of writing about place, landscape and the natural world.īut within this, women's voices have remained in the minority. If I coppiced the woodland, so to speak, and allowed the light to shine down to the forest floor and illuminate countless saplings now that a gap has opened in the canopy. What would happen, I wondered, if I simply missed out the fifty per cent of the population whose voices have been credited with shaping this particular 'cultural norm'.

Women on Nature by Katharine Norbury