Women on Nature: An Anthology of Women's Writing About the Natural World in the East Atlantic Archipelago

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'. 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. . .

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.

For the very first time, this landmark anthology collects together the work of women, over the centuries and up to the present day, who have written about 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 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 the natural world about them, from the fourteenth-century writing of the anchorite nun Julian of Norwich to the seventeenth-century travel journal of Celia Fiennes; from the keen observations of Emily Brontë to a host of brilliant contemporary voices.

Women on Nature presents a groundbreaking vision of the natural world which, in addition to being a rich and scintillating anthology that shines a light on many unjustly overlooked writers, is of unique importance in terms of women's history and the history of writing about nature. Contributors include:

Aalto, Kathryn
Abe, Naoke
Aldridge, Kitty
Ali, Monica
von Arnim, Elizabeth
Atkin, Polly
Austen, Jane
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia
Barker, Cicely M.
Barratt Browning, Elizabeth
Beer, Amy-Jane
Beeton, Isabella
Bell, Gertrude
Bellarby, Frances
Bennett, Claire-Louise
Blackie, Sharon
Blyton, Enid
Boase, Tessa
Brackenbury, Alison
Bradbury, Kate
Bronte, Charlotte
Bronte, Emily
Campbell, Nancy
Carew, Keggie
Carhew, Natasha
Cavendish, Margaret
Chester, Nicola
Cornford, Frances
Cracknell, Linda
Dacre, Ann
Darlington, Miriam
ní Dochartaigh, Kerri
Evans, Christine
Evans, Margiad
Evans, Sara
Fiennes, Celia
Fleming, Anna
George, Josie
Gittens, Chrissie
Gleeson, Sinéad
Goldsmith, Sally
Gramich, Eluned
Griffiths, Jay
Harrison, Melissa
Hauxwell, Hannah
Hawkes, Jacquetta
Holden, Edith
Holten, Katie
Jacoby, Olga
Jamie, Kathleen
Jedamus, Julith
Julian of Norwich
Kay, Jackie
Kempe, Margery
Kenward, Louise
Lear, Linda
Lee, Jessica J.
Lichtenstein, Rachel
Lingard, Ann
Liptrot, Amy
Lloyd, Karen
Lovell, Jane
Macdonald, Helen
Maitland, Sara
Malyon, Mary
Marland, Pippa
McAnulty, Bláthnaid
Mckenzie, Zakiya
McNeil, Jean
Mew, Charlotte
Meynell, Alice
Mitchell, Emma
Morris, Jan
Mort, Helen
Murray, Elizabeth Rose
Norgate, Stephanie
O'Garra Worsley, Annie
Okojie, Irenosen
Orr, Deborah
Oswald, Alice
Padel, Ruth
Pendarves, Thomasina
Philips, Katherine
Plath, Sylvia
Pilley, Dorothy
Porteous, Katrina
Reddy, Jini
Rooney, Rachel
Roper, Lynne
Rossetti, Christina
Sackville West, Vita
Samson, Polly
Sethi, Anita
Shepherd, Hilary
Shepherd, Nan
Sidney, Mary
Sieff, Daniela
Smith, Ali
Smith, Charlotte
Smith, Stevie
Sprackland, Jean
Sweeting, Jo
Talbot, Aletheia
Thomas, Sarah
Tucker, Trileigh
Underhill, Evelyn
Wellesley, Dorothy
Whitney, Isabella
Wilson, Nic
Woolf, Virginia
Wordsworth, Dorothy