SOURCE: Littenberg, Marcia B. “Gender and Genre: A New Perspective on Nineteenth-Century Women's Nature Writing.” In Such News of the Land: U. S. Women Nature Writers, edited by Thomas S. Edwards and Elizabeth A. DeWolfe, pp. 59-67. Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 2001.

[In the following essay, Littenberg discusses the conditions surrounding the flourishing of women's nature writing in the late nineteenth century.]

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, American popular culture embraced nature and nature study in a number of important ways that encouraged women writers. Women writers published in a wide variety of popular magazines, as well as in scholarly journals, ranging from the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's New Monthly Magazine to Nature, Scientific Monthly, Audubon, and the American Naturalist.¹ As this partial list indicates, a distinction was not always made between scholarly, scientific nature writing, and popular writing; the genre of nature writing during the late nineteenth century embraced not only appreciative personal essays and sketches but narratives of field work that combined science and sentiment. In addition to the narrative flexibility of nature writing during this period, women nature writers found a growing marketplace after 1860 in the popular journals and magazines that turned writing into a commercially viable career. As Richard Brodhead notes in Cultures of Letters, during the late nineteenth century, partly as a result of the growing number of popular literary and cultural journals and periodicals, “writing itself was being reestablished as a social activity in America, made the subject of a new scheme of institutional arrangements that stabilized the relations of authors to readers and solidified the writer's public support.”² Women nature writers therefore had an unprecedented number of literary options and a wider, more diverse reading public available to them, depending on where they chose (or were able) to publish, and the particular form and style in which they chose to write. Recontextualization of nineteenth-century American women's nature writing thus requires reconsideration of the significance of gender and genre to its popular appeal.

Nature writing, by men or women, as science or as entertaining sketch, shares a common rhetorical purpose: to change and to deepen readers' awareness of the world around them and accessible to them, if they had but eyes to see. The nature writer provides those eyes as well as interpretive strategies that allow readers to appreciate and understand what is being described. This common rhetorical purpose links Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson, John Burroughs to Celia Thaxter and Annie Dillard. What differs is the historical and cultural context of these writers and the particular concerns and interests of their readers. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in spite of their expressed enthusiasm for nature study and nature writing, Americans demonstrated marked ambivalence toward nature. On the one hand, they expressed with great sentiment their appreciation for the “sublime” beauty of unspoiled nature, and, on the other, they recognized that without aggressive programs of preservation, “unspoiled nature” was threatened with extinction.³ By the last decades of the century, nature appeared further removed from the everyday lives of most Americans, endangered by unchecked expansion, threatened by increasing industrialization and urbanization, and subsequently even more precious. Led by its most visible spokesmen, John Audubon, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Theodore Roosevelt, a public environmental reawakening occurred in the last decades of the century comparable in its impassioned rhetoric and religious fervor to the Great Awakening.⁴

The public's appetite for nature study and nature writing was enormous. When they could not tramp off to the woods and mountains themselves, Americans enthusiastically and often indiscriminately devoured nature writing by amateur enthusiasts and professional naturalists alike. Nature writing was a form of retreat narrative.⁵ Reading about nature provided vicarious experience, an excursion for urban readers, a day in the country, a summer among the pointed firs, a birding trip on a bronco, a morning in field or meadow with an informed guide. It was instructive, teaching city dwellers plant names, the characteristics of bird song, plumage, and habits, and introducing readers to the intricate relationships among plants, insects, animals, and birds in environments both exotic and near-at-hand. It awakened moral sensitivity to the importance of ecological relationships and thus encouraged the flowering of preservationist societies, such as the Audubon Society and later the Sierra Club, as well as the formation of garden clubs and bird-watching societies.

Although the most visible figures in this late nineteenth-century nature revival movement were male, women nature writers published extensively in the leading journals of the day and in a wide variety of popular magazines, including the New Yorker, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Lippincott's, National Geographic, and Nature. In his study of nature writing in The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell notes that “roughly half the nature essays contributed to the Atlantic Monthly during the late nineteenth century, the point at which the nature essay became a recognizable genre, were by female authors.”⁶ What helped to create this market for popular nature writing and to encourage women writers in this endeavor?

In part, it was the increased specialization of the natural sciences. The more specialized and academic the study of botany, zoology, or ornithology became, the less the general public felt connected by feeling and observation to nature. Combining first-hand observation with more accessible language and style, popular nature writing found an increasing market, much as the articles in such journals as Popular Science, Natural History, or the Smithsonian have for lay readers today. Because they served as guides and interpreters of the natural world, popular nature writers provided an important link between a public that felt itself cut off from nature, nostalgic for a simpler rural life, and eager to learn more about the world around them. In addition, women nature writers almost exclusively dominated the market for children's nature books used in schools and read with pleasure and enthusiasm by generations of young readers.⁷ Their names are less familiar to us not only because the scientific study of nature was dominated by male institutions and the leading conservation movements were spearheaded by male naturalists, but because the focus of many women nature writers was often on more local or domestic habitats rather than wilderness studies.⁸ They characteristically wrote a type of regional portrait that focused on local habitats and often demonstrated a special empathy for the natural world.⁹

The style and tone of women's popular nature writing was also marked by “sentiment,” an effusion of feeling for their subject and an appeal to its human interest. Frequently, women nature writers employed metaphors from domestic life directed at their largely young or female readership.¹⁰ These stylistic traits contributed to the later disregard of the scientific value of women's nature writing of this period, in spite of the wealth of specific observational details it characteristically contained. Professional jealousy was also a factor in obscuring the contributions of women naturalists and nature writers. In the 1870s and after, many educated women, encouraged by the introduction of botany and other natural sciences into women's academies and colleges, joined scientific organizations and sought work in museums and observatories. By the 1880s and 1890s, as the history of women in science suggests, there was a negative reaction to the “encroaching” of women into major and visible positions in professional organizations. Florence Merriam, for example, clearly a leading American ornithologist and nature writer, was finally accepted into the prestigious all-male American Ornithological Union as its first female member in 1885, but only in the capacity of an “associate member,” not as a fellow.¹¹

The dismissal of women's nature writing as more sentiment than science was also the result of a particularly heated public literary debate carried on in the nation's leading magazines and newspapers at the turn of the century. Led by John Burroughs's attack on Rev. William J. Long in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, this debate focused on both the style and purpose of nature writing. Burroughs argued that unlike scientific study, the literary treatment of nature “aims to give us the truth in a way to touch our emotions … and to satisfy the enjoyment we have in the living reality.”¹² While both the natural scientist and the literary nature writer convey natural facts, the nature writer “observes and admires” while the scientific naturalist collects. “The former would enlist your sympathies and arouse your enthusiasm; the latter would add to your store of exact knowledge,” notes Burroughs, who adds that both on occasion may be guilty of coloring or falsifying facts, but for different reasons. Burroughs acknowledges that the nature writer gives more than facts, “he gives you impressions and analogies and, as far as possible shows you the live bird on the bough [not the laboratory specimen].” The problem, Burroughs asserts, is not the different goals or methods of the scientist and nature writer but a tendency toward the false anthropomorphizing of bird, insect, and animal behaviors in the latter in order to invest nature study with “human interest.” The false attribution of human behavior to animals and birds, Burroughs argues, betrays nature and diminishes nature writing to a kind of Sunday-school lesson.

Burroughs's specific criticism of Long and other “sham naturalists” who engage in the misrepresentation of nature for public consumption thus rests on an essential critique of style as much as on method. While not specifically aimed at women nature writers, combined with the jealously guarded professionalism of the natural sciences, Burroughs's critique of literary sentimentalism did much to obscure the real contributions of women naturalists such as Florence Merriam, Olive Thorne Miller, and Mary Treat, and accounted in part for the disregard of women's nature writing of this period by later literary historians, who tended to dismiss it as sentimentalism.

The goal of the women nature writers did differ in part from that of male naturalists such as Burroughs, although like them he believed that “the most precious things of life are near at hand” and require only the ability to see and understand.¹³ Although they often provided extremely valuable field study observations, the primary goal of popular nature writers was to transmit their observations and experience to their readers, to create an imaginative awareness of the natural environment, and to shape readers' moral response to nature. Olive Thorne Miller, for example, pointed out in her First Book of Birds (1899) that she was less concerned with “the science of ornithology” than with arousing “sympathy and interest in the living bird.” Men who studied dead birds, she notes, “can tell how their bones are put together and how many feathers there are in their wings and tails. It is well to know these things. But to see how birds live is much more interesting than to look at dead ones. [The watcher will be] surprised to find out how much like people they act. After studying live birds, he will never want to kill them. It will seem like murder.”¹⁴ Florence Merriam, the best pure ornithologist among the women writers, wrote Birds through an Opera Glass (1889), Birds of Village and Field (1898), as well as numerous articles for Audubon Magazine primarily for novice bird-watchers. Although her writings are based on careful field observations in a variety of settings, her goal is to translate her enthusiasm for nature study to amateurs. Her valuable observations about bird song, markings, colorations, and habits in a highly readable style are marked by occasional unscientific metaphoric comparisons, directed at the amateur reader, attributing dubious sentiments to birds, such as her description of the robin in Birds through an Opera Glass as a type of “self-respecting American citizen, sitting on a branch, whispering a little song to himself … full of contented appreciation of the beautiful world he lives in.”¹⁵ Here, it is clear, her desire to draw a useful lesson from nature whimsically colors her description of this common American bird.

Partly because of the different emphasis and tone of women's nature writing in this period, later historians comfortably ignored this large body of popular nature writing, dismissing both its seriousness as science and significance as literature. This is the legacy that feminist scholarship has begun to reclaim. Vera Norwood's study Made from this Earth and the work of Marcia Myers Bonta on American women naturalists, Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists and American Women Afield: Writings by Pioneering Women Naturalists, as well as more comprehensive anthologies of American regionalism, have begun to unearth women's nature writing of this period, recontextualizing this writing, and claiming an important literary legacy by shedding new light on women's contributions to nature writing and the environmental movement.¹⁶ Most of these studies focus primarily on nonfiction nature writing. Both Norwood and Bonta begin their study with Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours (1850) and include Florence Merriam Bailey and Rachel Carson; only studies of American regionalism discuss Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett's descriptions of the natural environment in any detail, although a notable exception to this critical division between environmental nonfiction and literary bioregionalism occurs in Lawrence Buell's study The Environmental Imagination.

It is my contention that the study of nineteenth-century American women nature writers should be broadened to include not only the nonfiction naturalist essay or “sketch” but the regionalist sketch, often classified as regionalist fiction, because both share a parallel literary endeavor. There is clearly an overlap in the subjects, style, and intent of these related genres: to increase readers' awareness of the web of relations—whether ecological or sociological and familial—within a natural landscape. Although the regional sketch often employs dialogue and depicts characters within a community located in a rural setting, and nature writing is more frequently a narrative of solitude, both of these genres demonstrate the writer's interest in natural history, provide detailed accounts of the natural landscape and close, personal observations of the natural world and the rhythm of life in a particular locale.¹⁷ In addition, both share a common preservationist theme and often a similar tone, perspective, and focus. In the regional sketch, as in nonfiction nature writing by women, the writer serves as a guide, interpreter, and enthusiast, mediating between the reader and the environment being described, creating sympathy and concern for a world threatened by time, change, and external disruption. By reconsidering the regional sketch as part of the larger endeavor of popular nature writing, and by including portraits of rural people and rural communities that live in harmony with the natural world as part of a preservationist impulse, one can also appreciate more fully the role of women writers of this period and begin to reconstruct a female literary tradition in which these genres are more clearly interrelated.

The regional sketch and the nonfiction nature essay both gained recognition in the nation's leading literary and cultural journals during the last third of the nineteenth century. While it has become common practice to distinguish between the sketch, which contains fictional elements such as dialogue and characterization, and the nature essay, which shares many of the characteristics of the personal journal, it appears that many of the leading periodicals often did not draw such genre distinctions, treating both the “local color” sketch and the nonfiction nature piece as mutually supportive parts of an important textual and cultural agenda, to inform their readers about the wonders and delights found in nature through realistic narrative. The featured article in each issue of the Atlantic Monthly, for example, was often a descriptive travel narrative, a short essay about the natural wonders of a particular place, a natural history sketch, or a profile of an individual species, particularly birds or forest animals, as well as a sketch or story, often by Rose Terry Cooke or Sarah Orne Jewett. Never before or since this period have women writers been as widely represented in these parallel genres or found such favorable conditions for publication.

In his discussion of the “variegated character” of nature writing in the appendix to The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell suggests that nature writing draws on the techniques and focuses of many genres.¹⁸ Then, as now, the parameters of nature writing were not fixed. The mark of popular nature writing from the mid-nineteenth century, Buell notes, is the creative freedom it allowed its writers, combining empirical observation, popularized science, natural history, legend, folklore, gossip, and the picturesque.¹⁹ Buell's comments are supported by an advice column in the Atlantic Monthly to its “Contributor's Club,” which published essays anonymously, suggesting that the nature writer might use a variety of methods as long as the writer thinks of “himself” as a lens through which images of nature are filtered.²⁰ Buell himself includes both Sarah Orne Jewett's regional writing and Celia Thaxter's Among the Isles of Shoals (1873), which utilizes fictional methods as well as natural history techniques, in his study of “environmental nonfiction,” pointing out the overlap between travel narratives, literary bioregionalism, and genre sketches. Buell suggests that nonfictional literary bioregionalism and local color genre sketches frequently overlap in their methods, their “finely calibrated environmental sense,” their attachment to locale, and in their attempt to render imaginatively the look and feel of a place.²¹ Because literary regionalism was dominated by women writers and nature writing more clearly identified with male writers, Buell suggests that in writing about nature, “male” and “female” literary traditions overlap.²² A more convincing argument can be made for the merging of two related female literary genres, two aspects of regional writing, that explore the natural world and affirm the connections between the environment and the human community.

Although regional realism has on occasion been faulted for the narrowness or “impoverishment” of its vision, reading women's regional sketches as a form of “bio-regionalism,” as part of a larger effort to write about nature in a particular locale, helps us to recontextualize both their subject and method.²³ Limitation of geographic scope, for the nature writer or regionalist, does not infer a narrowness of vision, as Thoreau's Walden so effectively proves. Even while observing trout beneath the ice of a pond he is capable of demonstrating nature's profoundest mysteries. Nature can provide a wealth of detail and an abundance of material. Helping readers see this, is, in fact, the purpose of both genres. In her work Home Studies in Nature (1885), for example, Mary Treat notes of her study of insects and spiders in her one-acre backyard plot, “the more I limit myself to a small area, the more novelties and discoveries I make in natural history.”²⁴ The women regionalists would also prove that a wealth of material could be found in the smallest and seemingly most desolate of villages or even in a front garden.

It is clear that the nature essay and the regional sketch share a number of aesthetic concerns and a common objective, to offer a sympathetic portrait of nature. Both have what Buell terms “dual accountability”: an attempt to represent the natural world truthfully, and conceptual or imaginative fidelity, that which makes the natural world in all its complexity accessible and comprehensible to readers.²⁵ The first requires careful observation, the second, not only literary talent but a sympathetic identification with the subject as well. In the popular nature essay as in the regional sketch, narrative elements were often combined with naturalistic observations, encouraging readers to appreciate the natural world or to visit scenic regional locales and translating through representational fidelity the writer's feelings about a landscape. What mattered was the author's ability to convey a truthful sense of place, one that linked descriptions and explanations of the physical environment with the writer's subjective, identifiable response to it.

As Richard Brodhead reminds readers, nineteenth-century regional writing was written for a different, more literate and privileged culture than it portrayed.²⁶ Similarly, popular nature writing flourished in post-bellum America precisely because Americans were beginning to recognize that nature was endangered. The elegiac feel of women's nature writing, combined with close, detailed observation, echoed the concerns of the reading public.

By reading nineteenth-century women's nature writing as a form of regionalism, moreover, one can perceive certain stylistic affinities between these related genres. One of these is the metaphoric comparison between nature and human experience, as I have shown earlier in the quotations from the bird studies of Olive Thorne Miller and Florence Merriam. In the regional sketch, the metaphor often works the opposite way, so that human behavior can be understood and appreciated in terms of nature. In the sketch “Root-Bound,” for example, Rose Terry Cooke recounts a dialogue in which Mrs. Rockwell explains to her two female visitors why her plants blossom so profusely. She explains modestly that it is because they are “root-bound” rather than wandering willfully all over the garden and adds: “It's good for folks and flowers to be root-bound, I think, sometimes; especially if we want to bring forth good fruit.”²⁷ The women nature writers often explained the behavior of birds through homely domestic metaphors that would be appreciated by their largely female readership, such as the way the male kingbird jumped up politely when the female returned to the nest or how he held the dragonfly in such a way that the young could nibble off small bites that they could swallow, or how the chickadee defended its nest or a mother crow disciplined her disobedient chick when it would not come when she called. Imbuing nature with comparisons to domestic life not only made it interesting to readers, it helped to create concern for its protection.

One important difference between the style and method of women's regional sketches and women's popular nature writing requires some explanation, however, particularly for contemporary readers for whom the emotional style and domestic imagery of the women nature writers appears to be sentimentalizing. The women regionalists openly rejected the sentimentalism of early women's fiction in favor of a less rhetorical rendering of truthful experience, however homely or prosaic it might first appear. For the regionalists, sympathy was elicited by readers' identification with the rural locale and the characters' lives; it developed from pictorial realism, the faithful rendering of realistic details.²⁸ The nature essay also relied on its accurate rendering of observational details; however, the narrator/observer more directly intervened to explain and interpret these details and elicit her readers' sympathy. The difference in rhetorical style is greatest in those works directed to young readers. However, the nonfiction nature sketch has always utilized rhetorical interpretation to some extent, since its “characters” cannot speak for themselves and the actions of nature, however dramatic, require the naturalist's explanation as well as the artist's vision.

Even the designation “local color” for regional sketches suggests the analogy with the pictorial arts common in nineteenth-century reviews and essays. In an 1886 essay in the Critic, for example, James Lane Allen compares the painter's and regional writer's use of color, decreeing that “the writer must lay upon his canvas those colors that are true for the region he is describing and characteristic of it.”²⁹ He adds: “From a scientific point of view, the aim of local color is to make the picture of life natural and intelligible, by portraying those picturable potencies in nature that made it what it was …” The growing popularity of genre painting and the new emphasis on pleine aire composition in the visual arts may both have encouraged regionalist nature writers and provided an important cultural context in which their work was read and appreciated. The key aesthetic term for this period is the “picturesque,” a term that was employed favorably by John Ruskin in Modern Painters, and had been adopted, nearly as gospel, by American artists and art journals, particularly America's leading art journal of the period The Crayon. The humble naturalism of the luminist painters, such as William Sidney Mount, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Asher Durand, who depicted small, intimate landscapes and quiet scenes of rural life, provides an important pictorial analogue to the aim and method of both fictional and nonfictional regionalist nature writing. The small, picturesque luminist painting, suffused with a quiet light, suggests a world, a time, and a place free of the dividing conflicts of the age. Moreover, these genre paintings, like regionalist nature writing, reveal carefully detailed observation of the natural world, particularly of plants and animals, which often dominate the foreground. They also suggest the organic connection between nature and rural human experience central to the regionalist purpose. The pastoral idea held for a moment the balance between science, religion, philosophy, and art, offering a glimpse of the world as it might be or might have been, whole and luminescent, before it was dissected and analyzed by science or destroyed by the march of progress.

In France, the Barbizon school of painting, whose most famous member was Jean-Francois Millet, deserted the salons for the open air, and sought in paintings of nature and rural peasants the same sense of simplicity, truth, and organicism that prompted Thoreau's original “experiment in living.” Millet's American student, William Morris Hunt, an intimate friend of Celia and Levi Thaxter's, influenced through his art and instruction a rising generation of Boston artists, particularly women artists.³⁰ Hunt spread Millet's influence throughout the Boston artistic and literary community. Jewett's biographer, Paula Blanchard, cites some of the most dramatic examples of Hunt's influence on Jewett and her friends, including a series of photographs in the Millet style, some of which were used as illustrations for the 1893 edition of Deephaven, and a collection of “picturesque” stories, A Week Away from Time. However, the deepest impression on Jewett and her contemporaries was created by the picturesque rendering of the rural world in the paintings themselves. The paintings of Hunt and others lent a romantic charm and a classic dignity to portraits of rural life. The renewed interest in landscape art and in painting from nature inspired by Hunt and his followers encouraged women writers and artists. It further invigorated the genre of nature writing by creating a wider audience for “picturesque” writing as well as by connecting it to its classic pastoral lineage. In such an intellectual and cultural climate, women's nature writing flourished.

Both the aesthetic affinities between women's popular nonfiction nature writing and the regional sketch, and the cultural conditions that encouraged women writers to develop these related genres, suggest the need not only for historical recontextualization of women's nature writing but a reconsideration of these parallel female genres. It is important to recognize that the cultural conditions that encouraged women writers by providing them with journals that published their writing and a large, influential middle-class readership also extended the genre of nature writing.

Women's nature writing flourished in a cultural climate that valued nature but demanded change, that looked nostalgically back at rural life even as it was transforming it from reality into myth. In a nearly unprecedented way, the perspective offered by popular women's nature writing both in fiction and nonfiction found its place in American letters in the last part of the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. Marcia Myers Bonta, ed., American Women Afield: Writings by Pioneering Women Naturalists (College Station: Texas A. & M. University Press, 1995), xii.

2. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

3. See for example, Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 3-9.

4. Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1990), ix-x.

5. Brodhead describes Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs specifically in terms of her use of the “topoi of vacationing” to a “restorative place,” 145-50.

6. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 44-45.

7. Olive Thorne Miller wrote more than twenty nature books in the period from 1870 to 1915. Her First Book of Birds (1899) was one of the most popular and useful bird books not only for children but also for amateur birding enthusiasts. Other popular works by Miller include Little Brothers of the Air (Boston, 1892) and Bird-Ways (Boston, 1885). In addition to Olive Thorne Miller, other popular bird books for children were written by Mabel Osgood Wright: Birdcraft: A Field Book of Two Hundred Song, Game and Water Birds (1895); Neltje Blanchan: Bird Neighbors (1897); and Florence Merriam (later Florence Merriam Bailey), A-Birding on a Bronco (1896), Birds of Village and Field (Boston, 1898), and Birds through an Opera Glass (1900). Wright's Birdcraft and Miller's The Second Book of Birds also contained superlative illustrations by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Mabel Wright also was the editor of the children's section of Bird-Lore.

8. On the domination of male institutions, see for example Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), and Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Exceptions to a local focus by women nature writers include the later work of Florence Merriam Bailey, A-Birding on a Bronco, and her last book, Among the Birds in the Grand Canyon Country (1939), which are closer to the wilderness studies of John Muir and others naturalist adventurers.

9. See Bonta, American Women Afield, xii.

10. Florence Merriam Bailey, for example, includes the following whimsical comment on the affinity of squirrels and partridges for music in her Birds Through an Opera Glass: “One winter they seemed to show a fondness for music, often coming close to the house (although ‘painfully shy’) as I was playing the piano … the squirrels not only nibble their corn with complacent satisfaction when the music box is wound for them, but have even let themselves be stroked when a peculiarly pathetic air was whistled! Who dare say what forest concerts the pretty creatures may get up on the long winter evenings when they are tired frolicking on the moonlit snow!” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889) reprinted in Bonta, American Women Afield, 99.

11. See Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, 78; see also Paul H. Oehser, “In Memoriam: Florence Merriam Bailey,” Auk 69 (1952): 26.

12. John Burroughs, “The Literary Treatment of Nature,” Atlantic Monthly 94 (1904): 38. All quotations from Burroughs in this paragraph come from this article.

13. Burroughs, Preface to Boy and Man, reprinted in John Burroughs' America: Selections from the Writings of the Naturalist, ed. Farida A. Wiley (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1997), 3.

14. Miller, First Book of Birds, quoted in Joseph Kastner, A World of Watchers (San Francisco, Sierra Club, 1986), 165.

15. Florence Merriam Bailey, Birds through an Opera Glass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889).

16. See for example, Karen Kilcup, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1997).

17. See Randall Roorda, Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

18. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 397.

19. It appears, both from my survey of material published in the Atlantic Monthly in the period from 1870-1890 and from my examination of critical commentary from this period, that there were no definitive guidelines for the “nature essay” or objective criteria for distinguishing it from the “rural sketch.” Some account of the actual physical environment was clearly required, but just how much description, how scientific it had to be, how much freedom the individual writer had to express her feelings or to move, as Thoreau himself characteristically did, between close observation and idealized abstraction, appeared to be a matter of choice or personal style.

20. See William M. Tanner, Essays and Essay Writing Based on “Atlantic Monthly” Models (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920).

21. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 405-408.

22. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 406.

23. Frank Norris attacked realism (by women in particular) in “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” Boston Evening Transcript 18 (December 1901); reprinted in Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, 76. Ann Douglas Wood, “The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America 1865-1914” (Women's Studies 1 [1972]: 14) has been frequently cited and critiqued by more recent studies of women's regional writing.

24. Quoted in Bonta, American Women Afield, 20.

25. Buell notes that “the field of environmental nonfiction [in Thoreau's time] was itself a patchwork, in some ways more ‘polyphonic,’ more ‘heteroglossic,’ than that of the novel,” 397.

26. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 122.

27. Rose Terry Cooke, Root-Bound and Other Sketches (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968).

28. Willa Cather's essay in Not Under Forty (N.Y.: A. Knopf, 1922) helped shape later understandings of Jewett's fiction and the aim and method of regionalist fiction. Cather writes: “Miss Jewett wrote of everyday people who grew out of the soil, not about exceptional people at odds with their environment” (82). Cather called Jewett's sympathetic intuition “a gift from heart to heart.” The regionalists differentiated “sympathy” from “sentimentalism,” which by the end of the century had the negative connotation of “false emotionalism.”

29. James Lane Allen, “Local Color,” Critic 9, January 1886, as cited in Donna M. Campbell, Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915 (Athens, Ohio: University Press, 1997), 17.

30. Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 224-25.