In the early 1940s, Edith observed some birds in her garden stripping pyrethrum leaves from a plant to line their nests. She’d seen yellow robins putting green leaves in their nests but hadn’t given it much thought. A colleague reported sparrows using rue in their nests and Edith began to wonder if the antiseptic qualities of these plants were being used by the birds. Edith published her observations and theories in the Victorian Naturalist.
The editor at the time was Alec Chisholm, sixteen years Edith’s junior but already an acclaimed nature writer and ornithologist. He accepted the paper but added his own disclaimer.
‘A question mark must be placed against Mrs. Coleman’s statement,’ he said, noting that yellow robins only place dry leaves, never green, in their nests. ‘No other birds that I can recall make a practice of placing green leaves on the floor of the nest.’
Such an editorial afterword is unusual in science, but Edith did not appear perturbed. She continued to write and publish at great length about the use of fresh leaves in birds’ nests throughout her life, noting the importance of ‘keeping an open mind’ on the subject of herbs and birds – alluding to their medicinal and even ‘magical’ uses. And Chisholm continued to publish this avalanche of accumulating evidence without further objection.
Is it fair to characterise Edith’s writing as women’s nature writing? Would V. S. Naipaul be able to identify her work as being written by a woman, after a paragraph or two, from its sentimentality, banality or ‘feminine tosh’, as he puts it? But Naipaul writes fiction, not science. He is under no obligation to test his assertions with data or evidence. His claims are unsubstantiated, probably intended to offend and unlikely to be true.
It is often said that women’s nature writing is domestic, steeped in the small-scale and local, grown outward from the garden. The editors of an American anthology of women’s nature writing, At Home on This Earth, commented on the frequency with which women use the word ‘home’ in their nature writing. This domestic focus, they argue, arises because of the Victorian concept of ‘separate spheres’ of influence for the sexes: that women belong in the home, while men belong in the world.
Edith’s writing very much fits that mould. She does not write about adventures in the wilderness, great hikes into mountains or existential experiences of solitude and enlightenment. She does not write in ‘the male-dominated tradition that focuses on encounters with nature separate and isolated from our everyday existence’.
And yet, if ever there are nature writers who could be said to be domestic and homely it is White and Thoreau. White, who could never leave his home parish, who focused on small-scale, detailed, minute observations, who found distinctions between the all but indistinguishable warblers: willow, wood and chiffchaff.
Nor can I see how Thoreau’s Walden ‘helped craft a male-dominated tradition that focuses on encounters with nature separate and isolated from our everyday existence’. Thoreau is not exploring the wilderness, he is playing house at the bottom of Emerson’s garden. He explicitly rejected the distant wildernesses of Peru, Siberia, Canton and the Pacific.
‘Our limbs indeed have room enough but it is our souls that nest in a corner. Let us migrate interiorly without intermission, and pitch our tent each day nearer the Western horizon,’ he argued.
Walden is filled with the accounts of home-building and housekeeping. He notes carefully his food costs, saving money by eating boiled weeds. I appreciate the attraction of self-sufficiency but Thoreau’s tallying of household accounts, food savings and meals of boiled weeds has been termed by Buell as ‘the aesthetic of relinquishment’. I feel like I’m reading the diary of an obsessive Victorian housekeeper.
If Thoreau is the father of ‘new nature writing’, it is not because of his exploration of wilderness, but because of his exploration of the landscape of the soul. He is one of the first nature writers to consistently use the ‘I’ instead of the ‘eye’, to see himself as the subject instead of merely the observer. This has nothing to do with gender.
I can’t see how this domestic/wilderness model distinguishes between male and female nature writers. I wonder if, in fact, it says more about how we choose to interpret their writing. We see the domestic in women’s writing, and ignore it in men’s. It feels post hoc, like an excuse, rather than a causal explanation.
I prefer Jessie Ackermann’s ardent claims for the rights of women to claim their own space in the Australian landscape.
‘To settle on the land in Australia means something – in every respect,’ explained Jessie Ackermann. ‘But for all that it is a place where woman “has come into her kingdom”, Eve’s paradise re-discovered.’
Edith’s writing is not narrow in the sense of restricted or domestic, but rather focused and closely resolved. She does not discriminate between work done in her garden and explorations from distant hills and shores. It is the discovery, not the circumstances, that concerns her. She has no particular interest in physical feats of endurance, only intellectual feats of exploration.
Most of Edith’s work, I think, is written for fellow enthusiasts, for the lovers of the natural world. But sometimes she does, explicitly and deliberately, write directly for women, because women are important. It is mothers, as the primary carers in childhood, who have the most opportunity to teach their young children about the values of nature. Conservation requires ‘women behind the guns’.
‘It is recalled that lifelong habits are formed during the first six years of a child’s life,’ Edith argued in a series of letters in 1933. ‘If nature-loving mothers will exercise a wise influence during that vital period, there will soon be no necessity to appoint guardians of our flora and fauna. We shall have a national forest conscience, mainly through intervention of women.’
Later that year, her work first appeared in The Australian Woman’s Mirror, the start of a series of articles which were quite explicitly intended to engage women
