Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers (review)

The 1900s marked a proliferation of scholarship on American nature writing, and 1998 was no exception: that year saw a coming together of teachers, writers and activists for the first American Women Nature Writers Conference, held in Portland, Maine. This meeting sought to foster attention to women's writing about nature and has culminated in the publication of Such News of the Land, a collection of nineteen essays.

Those scholars working in the field of nature writing will find here discussions of many familiar authors: Susan Cooper, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Austin, Sally Carrighar, Marjorie Stoneman Douglass, Annie Dillard, Linda Hasselstrom, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Other essays pursue understudies aspects of additional familiar figures. Mary Ryder, for example, draws needed attention to the ecological issues addressed in Cather's One of Ours (1922) and A Lost Lady (1923), and Valerie Levy emphasizes the lesser known writing that Zora Neale Hurston completed for the Federal Writers' Project. Several contributions introduce "nature" as a theme in a writer's work, although many are underdeveloped and give lengthy descriptive summaries. Still others, however, provide welcome new material. Karen Cole's fascinating study of "gardening" culture in the early twentieth-century south, for instance, reveals Elizabeth Lawrence's pivotal position in fostering and recording the "conversation" of a regional gardening community (169).

The editors' introductory sections emphasize Henry David Thoreau and claim that he "helped craft" an "undeniably powerful" and "debilitating" division between nature and culture that permeates canonical American nature writing (1). Against this Thoreauvian tradition the editors posit the work of women writers, which "emphasizes how intricately intertwined the natural and cultural landscape are" (4). Such a characterization of Thoreau has the effect of setting him up as a bit of a straw man, especially as it overlooks his adherence to a philosophy that nearly equates engagement with the natural world with the true promise of human culture: the cultivated human spirit. Undoubtedly, I am quibbling, yet even Thoreau scholars have recognized the artificiality of a Thoreauvian-centered nature writing tradition, as attested by Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1995) and Richard Schneider's collection Thoreau's Sense of Place (2000). The editors of Such News of the Land, however, overlook the subtle complexities of Thoreau's work, assume his centrality to nature writing, and then fail to offer a developed explanation of the necessity for—and implications of—challenging his influence. Their discussion of Thoreau, then, is superficially cast and has the unfortunate effect of underrepresenting the significance of this new volume.

Like the editors, most contributors neglect the implications of their subjects. There are, however, notable exceptions that interrogate conventional understandings of the genre. For example, Daniel J. Philippon examines the work of three eighteenth-century literary-scientific writers and demonstrates that they "witness not only the transformation of amateur natural history into professional science, but also the gradual distinction of professional science from the arts and humanities" (11). And Marcia B. Littenberg, in her cogent discussion of the regionalist sketch in nineteenth-century periodicals, emphasizes the anachronistic potential of distinctions between scholarly writing, scientific writing, and popular writing. Finally Jen Hill compellingly complicates the rhetoric of scientific observation in Florence Merriam's Birds Through an Opera-Glass (1889), arguing that Merriam's descriptions "force her readers to recognize the shaping sensibility of the narrator/observer, and in doing so, to question the seemingly unassailable, male façade of scientific culture in the nineteenth century"(113). These are three essays that illustrate what Philippon calls the "edginess" that characterizes nature writing—"the tension the genre exhibits between science and literature, and between professional and amateur perspectives" (25). Critics must recognize that these female writers dwelt on the "edges" of science, literature, and social roles. Such a recognition then reveals the need to historicize definitions of "nature writing...