Surely Edith would be more influenced by White, England’s ‘greatest naturalist’, the pre-eminent model for amateur science and the man whose writings must have seeped into Edith’s knowledge at the earliest age from her naturalist father. Selborne was only 25 miles from Guildford, in a land where nature writing feeds into a rural mythology of the pastoral idyll. White is Bacon’s model scientist. The ultimate observer, not speculator, who contributes the detailed knowledge of one tiny area to the cumulative progression of public science. White seems the perfect model for Edith’s externally focused nature writing. And yet she mentions him rarely, anecdotally, in relation to bees, crocuses, oversized vegetables and the once-held belief in hibernation by swallows. There is no evidence that Edith regards White as her role model for elegant ‘nature writing’. Then again, there is no mention at all of Richard Jefferies either in her writing and yet her grandsons recall her being an ardent admirer of his work.
Nor does Edith ever mention Thoreau’s writing, although she has read H. A. Page’s biography of him. It is Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson who inspires her more. Philosopher rather than nature writer.
She did say, I suppose, that it was her father who inspired her interests, and that, in any case, the answers lie in the patient observation of nature, not in books. Perhaps the joy of nature, like science, lies in the active experience, the doing, rather than the reading and writing.
Edith was indisputably well read. Her grandsons both mention her literary tastes, her articles reference her familiarity with literature, she writes to the editor of the newspaper on various literary topics and her letters are filled with a shared love of books.
Peter recalls her reading interests as being ‘a cross-section of the great literature of the 18th and 19th century’ with a fondness for Shakespeare and a whiff of ‘empire era’. Her books, and those of her daughters, reflect a strong interest in English countryside living. She was particularly fond of Richard Jefferies, William Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Robert Louis Stevenson. She kept a ‘fairly comprehensive range’ of Rudyard Kipling’s work as well as H. G. Wells.
The literary quotes and references which filled her articles reflect more than just the breadth of her reading and her love of language. Edith was integrating the language of her childhood into the Australian landscape: re-applying and modifying it to new purposes. Her understanding of Australia was built on the foundations of a European literary heritage. She used the persuasive language of her predecessors to strengthen her authority to speak on such matters. ‘She once laughingly told me that she thought The Age accepted her first article “Birds at Blackburn” because she had begun it with a quotation from R. L. Stevenson’s “Prayer”,’ recalled Kate Baker.
I try to analyse the literary sources of one of her orchid papers. The first page quotes Robert Browning, Stephen Phillips and Algernon Swinburne. There are references to well-known Williams – Shakespeare, Hazlitt and Wordsworth – and to Maurice Maeterlinck and Robert Burns. The next page continues with Oscar Wilde, more Robert Burns, James Russell Lowell, Percy Shelley and possibly Anthony Trollope.
I stop analysing. This will take years and I’d end up with a research thesis, not a book. I notice that in closing she quotes the Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd, as if indicating a successful transition from the literature of the Old World to the New.
In a letter to the editor, about books to ‘dip into’, she recommends the ‘Book of Job’, the Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Lamb’s letters (‘in two handy volumes’) and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s essays and poems collected in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
Novels, perhaps, are less ‘dippable’. But still she recommends Lorna Doone and Precious Bane.
Her choice of Richard Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, I suspect, has little to do with its popularity in the aftermath of the marriage of Princess Louise to the Marquis of Lorne. Like Thomas Hardy, Blackmore’s strengths lay more in the richness of his descriptions than the strength of narrative plotting. Blackmore was ‘a hale, homely market gardener’, happiest in his orchards and vineyard.
‘One may write passage after passage of “Lorna Doone” in blank verse of almost perfect metre,’ says Edith. ‘Whether Jan Ridd is describing the coming of spring to his valley, golden harvest, white winter; or telling of his love for Lorna, he speaks in lyric words.
‘All of his readers must agree that Blackmore’s books reveal him as a scholar, wedded to nature,’ she continues. ‘Those who are reading for “escape” in these dire days could not do better than to take up “Lorna Doone” with “its orchards full of contentment.”’
‘Her interest in literature,’ her grandson Peter reflects, ‘was, I think, in description and atmosphere.’
In other letters she mentions Conrad and Galsworthy, and admires Gordon and Dennis, Shakespeare and Kipling, while gently correcting their biological imprecisions. H. G. Wells and Edward Bellamy stand testimony to her interest in science fiction. She mentions the eminently readable Walter Hines Page and his southern lyrical charm, and ‘Q’ – Arthur Quiller-Couch – whose books On the Art of Writing and On the Art of Reading she particularly enjoys.
She read Australian poets: Alexander G. Stevens, whom she knew through his sister Hilda, and the prolific, but little published, Myra Morris. She read Australian stories by Ellis Rowan to her daughters.
She discusses the role of the ‘lovely virtue’ of courage in James M. Barrie’s writing, as ‘by no means confined to the stronger sex’. She takes great comfort from Emerson, as a ‘tonic’, from his encouragement of self-reliance and the idea that the things we have lost may not
