The neatly pressed sheets of plants, with notes of various levels of historical antiquity attached, quickly answer my question. J. G. Coleman has been mistranscribed from ‘Mrs J. G. Coleman’. The specimens were clearly collected by Edith, not James.
It occurs to me that I have never read of Edith referring to herself by her husband’s name and initials. In her own letters and articles she is always Edith Coleman or Mrs Coleman. Some of these specimens also have her original collection notes attached. It is not Edith who has added the initials. It is the recipient of her generosity: Reverend Rupp.
Rupp records the collector under her husband’s name: Mrs. J. G. Coleman. Time, error and transcriptions have reduced her identity to that of James. If James had collected orchids in his own right there would be no way of untangling them. But it seems that Rupp recognised his error. On some of the specimens he has added, later, in a different pen, the word ‘(Edith)’ above the initials. On others, he has rubbed both the addition and the initials out entirely, rewriting ‘Edith’ into the space so that there can be no confusion. He has erased the erasure and restored Edith to her own identity.
In 1923 the Tintern Old Girls Association held its annual dance raising funds for the War Memorial Scholarship Fund. An article in The Age documents the event – all two columns of text devoted entirely to the description of each and every girl’s dress.
Parson’s bands (Eriochilus cucullatus) from Rupp’s collection – with the collector amended from J. G. to Edith Coleman
‘Miss Dorothy Coleman was in delphinium blue taffeta and her sister Gladys wore a pretty frock of cherry shot taffeta which suited her to perfection.’
The article titled ‘Pretty Girls in Smart Frocks’ might more aptly have read ‘Smart Girls in Pretty Frocks’ but that was not, it seems, the journalist’s interest. The annual dance, with its laden tables of food, was an event where ‘housewifely accomplishments are added to their scholastic achievements’.
Such triviality was not just directed at young marriageable ladies. The following year, a celebration of the renovated hall at Blackburn described similar charms of suburban couture.
‘Residents of Blackburn are proud of their enlarged and redecorated hall, the opening of which was celebrated by a jolly dance on September 10,’ the Box Hill reporter enthused. ‘The hall presented a gay scene with its appropriate decorations. Dainty refreshments were laid on poppy-decked tables in the supper room.’
Among the many guests described, all female, was ‘Mrs Coleman, flame satin veiled with black georgette and caught with a rose on the shoulder’.
If this is Edith, I can hardly recognise her. It reminds me of another dance, and another nature writer, separated by the Atlantic and almost a century.
‘The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried,’ complained Thoreau. ‘They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure whether or not they are there or not there.’
I think Thoreau was going to the wrong parties.
Edith exhibits no anxiety about her work or her capabilities. Occasionally she makes an error, and is annoyed about it. But in general, in public and private, her writing is pervaded by a calm, confident and utterly authoritative aura that brooks no patronage.
She would have swiftly corrected Thoreau’s misconceptions about women had she met him at a dinner party, kindly and humorously, but firmly, as she does Mr J. F. McCormack, who criticises the ‘lady – Edith Coleman’ who recommended in a letter to The Age Emerson’s essays as bedside reading.
‘In my opinion the place for thought-provoking essays is not the bedside table, but the library, where they can be frequently perused,’ he declares, considering these essays too stimulating to be ‘somniferous’.
‘I had forgotten that there are many, alas! who use books to woo sleep, so apt are we to measure another’s need by our own,’ Edith replies lightly. ‘Some of us read in bed for pure enjoyment . . . The test of a bedside book is not that of rereading but of “dipping into” in any spare movements [and] Emerson’s “Essays” can be opened anywhere.’
This is not the only time she responded to a public ‘correction’.
‘Strictly speaking, your contributor, Edith Coleman (Blackburn) was not right in her correction of “Maryborough” who stated that plants derived nitrogen from the air,’ writes J. H. Sampson of Vermont. ‘Leguminous plants in association (symbiosis) with certain micro-organisms contained in nodules upon the roots of the plants do derive nitrogen from the air.’
‘My letter was not intended as a correction of “Maryborough’s” statements,’ Edith clarifies in response, ‘but a friendly note from one nature lover to another, that plants do not derive nitrogen from the air through their leaves.’
I think this is what the American literature professor, Lawrence Buell, calls ‘Victorian feminist mock insouciance’. It is a familiar pattern, he says, of ‘the woman writer creating a space for feisty assertion with the parenthesis of “deference”’. Buell quotes the American nature writer Celia Thaxter’s employing the ‘left-handed compliment’ to devastating effect in 1874.
‘It takes Thoreau and Emerson and their kind to enjoy a walk for a walk’s sake, and the wealth they glean with eyes and ears. I cannot enjoy the glimpses Nature gives me half as well, when I go deliberately seeking them, as when they flash on me in some pause of work. It is like the pursuit of happiness; you don’t get it when you go after it, but let it alone and it comes to you. At least this is my case. In the case of geniuses (now is that the proper
