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 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999) 395 pp. $55.00 cloth $20.00 paper

In its conceptualization, Gates' book is history of a traditional sort. Gates is concerned with possibilities rather than probabilities. Although her examples are largely drawn from Britain and some parts of its empire--with occasional detours to the United States--she does not want to establish the degree to which her subjects were representative social types of their (generously defined) Victorian and Edwardian era, or even to locate them in a distinctive cultural milieu. Rather, she wants to describe the full range of possible modes of relating to the natural world that were available to women within the era that her study covers, not to identify responses to nature that were characteristic of (if not necessarily predominant among) specifiable populations of women. As she herself observes, most of the chapters in her book could be the basis for separate books, and she states that her intention is to offer "readers starting points for further inquiry" (5).

Thus, Gates' cast of characters is both enormous and various. For example, Elizabeth Gould (1804-1841) was a skilled bird illustrator, but her husband John has been given virtually all of the credit for her work, not least because her particular artistic contribution to his books was masked by the signature "J & E Gould," which was affixed to all of the illustrations that the pair produced. Isabella Bird (1832-1904) "was deeply stirred by a kind of transcendental experience" when she climbed the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, exemplifying a type of reaction to nature that Gates terms the "Victorian female sublime," but Bird "chose to objectify" her experience in her writing "by depicting the mountains' unfamiliar vastness in scientific terms" (177). Octavia Hill (1838-1912) devoted herself to elevating the material circumstances of working people and the poor, agitating to improve their housing and to ensure that they would have easy access to gardens and other open spaces. She had significant impact on public policy because she couched her appeals in the language of public health. Arabella Buckley (1840-1929), Charles Lyell's sometime secretary, became the author of popular science books for children that were intended to convey the "great moral lesson . . . that amidst toil and suffering, struggle and death, the supreme law of life is the law of SELF-DEVOTION AND LOVE" (quoted 60). Anna Bonus Kingsford (1846-1888), who campaigned for the (British) Married Women's Property Act passed in 1870, understood her fight for women's rights to be of a piece with spiritualism and anti-vivisectionism. The paleobotanist Marie Carmichael Stopes (1880-1958) earned her doctorate in 1904, and became the first woman scientist on the faculty of the University of Manchester. She gained fame (indeed notoriety) as a sexologist, whose Married Love (London, 1918) was intended to guide women to sexual fulfillment. Isabel Savory's A Sportswoman in India (London, 1900), which had at least one illustration of its author aiming her gun at her quarry (reproduced on 205), contributed to the genre of enthusiastic hunting narratives produced by the likes of Frederick Courteney Selous, the prototypical "great white hunter."

Gates' book succeeds in her own terms. Some of the figures that she describes--among them Gould and Mary Anning (1799-1847), a fossil collector--did not receive proper credit for their contributions to science, but in this respect, they were no different from men who served as illustrators and collectors in their day. As the examples I have given indicate, some of Gates' subjects occupied distinctly female social niches; others moved confidently in what are usually thought to be thoroughly masculine spheres. Specialists in the histories of such subjects as housing reform or natural history will certainly quibble about details in Gates' narratives, but we are bound to acknowledge that we have learned...