Timber Press | 3rd June, 2020 | £18.99
A wonderful celebration of twenty-five women, both historical and current, whose writing has deepened our connection to the natural world. Some of your favourite authors might not be included but as Kathryn says, this is only through lack of space. She continues: ‘Think of these pages as a glance backward and a look forward, as well as a celebration of women who bring a different dimension to natuare writing, rather than a compendium of every woman who ever wrote about the natural world.’ Here are some of the writers included: Dorothy Wordsworth, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Gene Stratton-Porter, Vita Sackville-West, Gretel Ehrlich, Diane Ackerman, Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Rush.
Aalto walks these paths with us as she discusses the lives and cultural history of these extraordinary writers. Let’s hope this work inspires a new generation of women to start ‘writing wild’.
What a joy to travel these paths alongside Kathryn Aalto and such fierce, trailblazing, and perceptive women. —Sarah L. Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post critic and author of The Art of Grace
This fine and thoughtful book puts these remarkable women writers, past and present, right smack bang into focus where they belong — as key shapers of how we see the natural world. A book everyone who loves nature writing would benefit from reading. It is chock full of my heroes, and some others I learnt for the first time.—James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral
An impassioned and illuminating anthology that serves as an act of recovery and discovery, a personal celebration, and a timely reminder of the wealth and sheer power of women’s voices. —Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground
“This book is a wonderful jumping-off point for anyone who loves the outdoors and wants to know more about the many talented female writers who have made it their work’s focus.” —BookPage
“an array of global voices, past and present, fuelling the biodiversity of our reading. Amongst these, Kathryn draws attention to Dorothy Wordsworth as a ‘mountaineer, diarist, poet’, identifies Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours importance four years prior to Thoreau’s Walden, and advocates across genres in the contemporary, exploring ‘cli-fi’ writer Saci Lloyd, poet Kathleen Jamie and life-writer Amy Liptrot.” — Will Smith, Cumbria Life
“Exciting, inspiring, intimidating, and bold.” —San Francisco Book Review
“A heartening book, granting attention to women who dared to write and ramble wild.” —BBC Countryfile
Kathryn Aalto is a writer, designer, lecturer and historian – we studied together at the University of Bristol. For the past twenty-five years, her focus has been on places where nature and culture intersect: teaching literature of nature and place, designing gardens, and writing about the natural world. Her work explores historic and horticultural themes with a contemporary twist. She is the author of The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood (2015) and Nature and Human Intervention (2011).
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