Women on Nature - 100+ Voices on Place, Landscape and the Natural World - Paperback

This scintillating anthology provides a timely new perspective on women’s writing about the natural world. There has, in recent years, been an explosion of writing about place, landscape and the natural world. But within this blossoming of interest, women’s voices have remained very much in the minority. In Women on Nature, Katharine Norbury has sifted through the pages of women’s fiction, poetry, household planners, gardening diaries and recipe books to show the multitude of ways in which they have observed and recorded the natural world about them, from the fourteenth-century writing of the anchorite Julian of Norwich to the seventeenth-century travel journal of Celia Fiennes; from the keen observations of Emily Brontë to the brilliant new voices throughout our archipelago writing today.

Katharine Norbury is the author of The Fish Ladder which was shortlisted for the 2016 Wainwright Prize, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and was a Book of the Year in the Guardian, Telegraph and Observer newspapers. She has contributed to the Observer, the Guardian, the Telegraph, The Washington Post, Caught by the River and Lonely Planet magazine.   Excerpt: One time, however, we were near quarrelling. He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath on the middle of the moors, with bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up over head, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness: mine was rocking in a rustling green tree with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecstacy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle, and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive, and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine, and began to grow very snappish. At last, we agreed to try both, as soon as the right weather came and then we kissed each other and were friends. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte