Wild and Fearless: The Life of Margaret Fountaine (review)

Natascha Scott-Stokes's Wild and Fearless: The Life of Margaret Fountaine is the first biography of the butterfly collector Margaret Fountaine, whose 22,000–specimen collection is currently housed in the Norwich Castle Museum. Wild and Fearless follows the publication of W. F. Cater's condensation of Fountaine's twelve-volume diary into two publications, Love Among the Butterflies (1980) and Butterflies and Late Loves (1986, which covers the last three volumes of the journal), although Scott-Stokes works from the original manuscripts and references the diary by volume. The edited versions of the diaries, Scott-Stokes claims, present Fountaine "as an eccentric Victorian with an indiscriminate passion for men" (15). In her biography, Scott-Stokes aims to correct this view of her subject.

Scott-Stokes advances our knowledge of various facets of Fountaine's life. She provides, for instance, a carefully researched family tree, one that brings to light the enormous size of many of the branches of Fountaine's family. Descriptions of Fountaine's use of Cook's travel agency, the current situation in places that Fountaine traveled to, and the current state (often extinction) of the many rare butterflies Fountaine collected are of additional interest. Certainly the mention of insect extinction adds to the sorry record of the impact of the late-Victorian and Edwardian collection crazes on native orchids, ferns, birds, and sea life. Scott-Stokes also attaches a helpful list of Fountaine's published works.

Like other biographers of women, however, Scott-Stokes overemphasizes and privileges her subject's emotional life over her professional achievements. Scott-Stokes has a tendency toward melodrama, and her care in assembling records of Fountaine's scientific achievements is undermined by forced cliffhanger transitions announcing that coming events would "mark her forever" (28). The biography's organization roughly mirrors the edited journals, but marks the stages in Fountaine's life with the chapter headings, "Passion," "Adventure," "Love," and finally, "Butterflies." Speculating about Fountaine's inner life, Scott-Stokes produces such romance-novel tinged passages as: "He avoided eye-contact, but the burning gaze upon him must have been inescapable" (41) and "The roller-coaster of Margaret's eventful life was about to start, the lows lower and the highs higher than her wildest fancies could have imagined" (28). It is often very difficult to distinguish between Scott-Stokes's language and Fountaine's as Fountaine's phraselogy is often incorporated into the narration without the use of quotation marks. Those wanting a sense of Fountaine's writing are still better served by Cater's edited collection.

Although Scott-Stokes recognizes how boring a young sheltered lady's life might be, more context for Fountaine's adolescent loves and a better sense of her childhood collecting activity would have been appreciated, especially as she gained an unusual degree of acceptance by scientific societies, something Scott-Stokes discusses rather late in the biography. As an adolescent, Fountaine obviously saw her life filtered through her readings. Fountaine's infatuation with a curate reflects the "curatolatry" of the 1860s, discussed in such works as Charlotte Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family (1865). Such contextualization would have placed the earlier diary entries in better perspective, especially as the diaries were rewritten from notes and provide the fuller picture Scott-Stokes promises in the introduction. It is also apparent from later comments that the Norfolk region where Fountaine grew up was an especially active butterfly collecting area; the impact of these collecting societies on her earlier life would have been of interest, as would the scientific connections of her extended family. The administrator of her legacy, her uncle Sir John Bennet Lawes, for example, founded the chemical fertilizer industry, but we learn nothing of that.

A naturalist/collector has skills often undervalued in an academic world that values abstraction. Naturalists have an imaginative capacity to enter into another species' world and perceptions. Such naturalists as Fountaine and her companion, Khalil Neimy...