Women on Nature

There has, in recent years, been an explosion of writing about place, landscape, and the natural world. However, within this, women's voices have remained in the minority.

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. 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. Katharine Norbury has sifted through pages of women's fiction, poetry, biography, gardening diaries, and recipe books, garnering accounts from artists, farmers, theologians, and natural scientists to demonstrate the multitudinous ways in which women have observed the world around them.

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 as 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. It is of unique importance in terms of women's history and the history of writing about nature.