Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (review)

Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World, by Barbara T. Gates; pp. xv + 293. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998, $20.00, £14.28.

Despite continuing attention to once-neglected Victorian women novelists, new anthologies of Victorian women's poetry, and collections of women's writing on the woman question, the feminist project of recovering women's voices, Barbara T. Gates ably reminds us, is hardly over. Indeed, with Kindred Nature, Gates cuts across genres to consider multiple modes of Victorian and Edwardian women's engagement with nature and, in doing so, defines a supple and inventive tradition in women's writing. While this array of material might be lost in parceling it out by genres which are often relegated to minor status, Gates instead tracks women's persistent and significant engagement with the natural world to demonstrate a continuing legacy in women's writing of reinterpreting Darwinism, of ecological consciousness, and of pioneering forms of nature writing.

Gates begins with a fundamental question of conceptual "circumstance": when women are embedded in men's narratives of science and nature as nature, and are therefore seen as lacking men's intellectualized and objective perspective on an object of study, how might their writing on nature be made to matter? Mindful that writing about science and nature is thus necessarily gendered, Gates answers that women convey their perspectives with the means at hand, which is to say, with great flexibility. As increasingly professionalized, official venues closed to them, women responded by devising inventive means to generate "new narratives of science and of women" (105), reaching broad and sizable audiences through travel narratives, sexological discourse, children's tales, farming narratives, and garden writing among many others. In short, Gates reminds us that we will find women's careful observations of, reflections on, and theorizing about the natural world in overlooked places.

In Kindred Nature, Gates divides the terrain into three categories: Part One takes up women "On the Edge of Science" as popularizers, illustrators, and collectors of specimens; Part Two addresses women as activists "on nature's behalf"; Part Three investigates the intimate ground of aestheticizing nature in diverse venues adapted or created by women writers.

As Gates shows, until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the communication of "science for the masses had become too important to entrust simply to the care of women" (64), women were a primary force disseminating scientific information and new structures of thought to the general reader. Women as interpreters and synthesizers, marginalized "on the edge of science," nonetheless significantly helped readers "to grow from one set of beliefs to another" (54), as science writer Arabella Buckley put it, particularly through their deft management of the inherently appealing "fictiveness of science writing" (58). Buckley was only one of many in a long list of women who brought the excitement of science as an unfolding story to hitherto untutored readers: Michael Faraday, for example, credited his career to the interest sparked as a child by reading Jane Marcet's lucid and engaging introductions to chemistry. In many instances, women who created precise illustrations for others' books conveyed information more clearly than the text. Women were not only visible interpreters of scientific disciplines, but also the necessary and often invisible collectors of data, mistakenly relegated to the ranks of mere laborers. As Gates shows with the careers of Mary Anning, Mary Kingsley, Beatrix Potter, and many others, they were knowledgeable students of their own collections, making significant contributions and revisions to classification and variation, and were--for a time--(quietly) sought for their opinions. Women frequently accepted this minimizing of their work; yet as male-defined professionalism in societies and recognition of specialists with the imprimatur of institutions increased over the course of the century, it mattered little whether women were self-effacing or more aggressive. The history of the official rebuffs to Potter's important work in...