Book Review

At Home on This Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women's Nature Writing. Edited by Lorraine Anderson and Thomas S. Edwards. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2002. Xi + 404 pp. Bibliography, index. Cloth $60.00; paper $30.00.

Throughout the nineteenth and well into the late twentieth century, a turf war raged between the sexes over the right to speak for nature. This conflict has been acknowledged by social historians, by historians of science, and certainly by biographers. But nowhere has that dispute been so meticulously documented as by the two fine, and very different, anthologies under review here. In Nature's Name, an anthology of women's writing and illustration from 1780 to 1930 edited by the University of Delaware's distinguished professor Barbara T. Gates, introduces over seventy British women—and one American—some well known, but most not, who have written and drawn in an effort to speak authentically for nature. Lorraine Anderson and Thomas S. Edwards's selections in At Home on This Earth follows a more traditional format to survey the work of fifty-one American women writers born between 1801 and 1974. Both anthologies include a wide variety of genres, including memoir, story, journal, sketch, oration, poem, illustration and essay. Taken together the two volumes provide unequaled representation of women's efforts on both sides of the pond to challenge the social constraints that blocked their self-realization, and to speak for nature. What chiefly distinguishes these collections is the role of science, and the way in which women have participated in it, practiced it, and been excluded from it in their efforts to interpret the nature of nature and their own identities.

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