Women On Nature

This video is available on our West Cork Literary Festival youtube channel. Click here to watch

In recent years there has 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. This anthology, Women on Nature, 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 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 including Jan Morris, Nancy Campbell and Jini Reddy.

Women on Nature presents a ground-breaking vision of the natural world which, in addition to being a rich and scintillating anthology, is of unique importance in terms of women’s history and the history of writing about nature.