The Afterword addresses the historical dominance of white voices in British nature writing, and the marginality of race, class and gender politics in the genre. This tendency matches continuing inequalities in the social and ethnic composition of British environmentalist movements. Contemporary nature writing also reflects regional inequalities, with many of its leading figures clustering around East Anglia. Nonetheless, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s recent book The Grassling exemplifies British nature writing that stands out not only through the unconventional background of its author, but also through its experimental techniques. At the same time, platforms such as The Willowherb Review suggest that the genre and the critical culture around it are gradually changing to allow room for more diverse voices. However, nature writers of colour venturing into rural environments still find themselves contending with the stark racial divide between Britain’s cities and countryside. Similarly, a growing range of LGBTQ* nature writers are becoming increasingly visible in the genre and challenging heteronormative codings of the rural. In the aftermath of Brexit and a global pandemic, Britain’s nature writers confront a nation highly divided and isolated, and a literary heritage permeated by elitist elements which need to be reckoned with.

British nature writing is a conflict-ridden mode that speaks to contradictions in the modern condition, and a crisis-ridden mode that addresses the modern crises of the environment, of representation and of the alienated self. It returns repeatedly to problems of mimesis and the non-transparency of language, and to the slippages between ecological facts and the cultural imagination. ‘Nature writing’ is a problematic category, and classifications of earlier literature as such must be qualified, recognising the historical overlapping of environmental literature with natural history and other genres. Although British nature writing grew in dialogue with its American equivalent, it has always been less concerned than the latter with the wilderness, addressing more cultivated environments in which wildlife intermingles with human social and economic activity. The genre has long sought spiritual renewal and significance in wildlife and engaged in conservation movements, although its environmentalist ethics have not been consistent. British nature writing has also been deeply shaped by the pastoral and georgic traditions, causing it to waver between the foci of leisurely contemplation and laborious activity.

Chapter 4 examines contemporary nature writing, initially focusing on the ‘new nature writing’ of the past few decades. It argues that this writing, ostensibly an attempt to engage with the ‘post-natural’ conditions of the Anthropocene, is haunted by a feeling of inadequacy in relation to its predecessors and marked by the frustrations of ‘late style’. Indeed, many British writers of the period are best seen as ‘late Moderns’, expressing deep-seated anxieties about themselves, their writing, and their position in a rapidly diminishing natural world. This thesis is examined in relation to writers whose work simultaneously attempts to recall the wild and reflects on the impossibility of that exercise; other writers are then brought in to examine those contemporary post-industrial landscapes that might create the conditions of possibility for a ‘new wild’. The second half of the chapter pursues this line of argument, but in relation to another popular subgenre, animal writing, which is seen as containing regenerative potential but also as communicating unsettling insights into the always unstable relationship between animal others and human selves. The chapter then concludes with some reflections on a different kind of violence, the violence of the elements, which in today’s era of accelerated climate change is both significantly influenced by human beings and beyond the bounds of human control.

Chapter 1 reveals the complexity and self-consciousness of Romantic nature writing, bringing together authors who share an interest in nonhuman nature as a dynamic process. It also addresses the porousness of Romantic nature writing as a mode of engagement across different kinds of texts. A key claim is that, while Gilbert White’s localism and close field observations were influential on later nature writing, so was the strand of confessional autobiography pioneered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Romantic nature writing is often represented as a self-aggrandising masculine mode. But women writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith were significant, particularly in their portrayals of nonhuman nature as entangled with everyday human life. The chapter also addresses labouring-class writers, bringing John Clare’s natural history prose into dialogue with the work of the artist Thomas Bewick and the novelist and poet James Hogg. All three resisted and lamented the forces of modernisation, but did so through developing innovative modes of representation. Even at its most backward-looking, Romantic nature writing engaged with the contradictions and conflicts of modernity. And, while influenced by natural theology, it also dared to speculate about deep time and the transience of human species.

Chapter 3 addresses the Modern period. As good a way as any of designating the period is via Eric Hobsbawm’s moniker the Short Twentieth Century (1914–91), which he sees as an age of extremes marked, especially in its first half, by a sequence of potentially world-ending catastrophes bookended by the two world wars. Much nature writing of the time evidences this apocalyptic trend, though it also takes heart in the regenerative properties of nature, which is viewed, via the lenses of such fast-developing disciplines as ecology and ethology, with an increasingly scientific eye. The first part of the chapter draws accordingly on writing which, informed by evolving ecological understandings, also debates the protectionist measures needed to combat species extinction in an ecologically threatened world. These ecological threats are then brought to bear on early- to mid-twentieth-century rural writing, which is often all too hastily viewed as reacting against the modern forces of industrialisation and urbanisation, but is better seen as belonging to a complex machinery of rural representation adapted to the cultural needs of post-war England as well as to the new technological demands of a rapidly modernising world.

Victorian nature writing vacillated between escapist pastoral idealism and hands-on georgic realism. Its narrators were at once labourers and idlers, scientists and aesthetes. The genre’s hybridity allowed it to mediate between mechanistic paradigms of nature and religious beliefs and experiences. Natural environments were constructed as realms of both Darwinian struggle and spiritual revelation. Imagining nature appreciation as a form of self-culture sometimes encouraged a nascent ecological and humanitarian sensibility. However, Victorian nature writing remained generally anthropocentric, centring the human mind. Yet, some authors, particularly later in the period, also framed wild environments and organisms as radically alien and unknowable. These different tendencies were often expressed through rhetoric of strangeness and estrangement, which dovetailed with ambivalences about identity, place and belonging. While authors classified objects, creatures and plants as alternately native or foreign, these categories frequently became blurred or uncertain. Authors also equivocated on where to locate ‘nature’, tracing it through rural, coastal and urban areas, in the great outdoors and human homes. Authors discussed include John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Philip Henry Gosse, Margaret Gatty, Hugh Miller, Eliza Brightwen, Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson.

Woolf's familiarity with trends in the life sciences led her to draw upon the study of nature as a source of analogy when considering methods of representing life in fiction. Collection and classification have been recognised before as metaphors important to Woolf's conception of writing. As I noted in the introductory chapter, critics such as Richter and Robinson have interpreted the hunting of moths and the netting of butterflies as analogies for Woolf's own creative process, while Sarsfield regards ‘the question of how to “pin down” life in words without destroying it, to “pin” the moth without killing’ as a ‘perennial dilemma’ for Woolf and sees no solution to the ‘writing = pinning = killing conundrum’ in Woolf's work. Whether they assume Woolf's approval or disapproval of collection and classification as a metaphor for writing, Richter, Robinson, and Sarsfield are alike in regarding the taxonomic method as the sole analogy for the writing process that Woolf drew from the life sciences. In fact, however, Woolf also drew analogies from other, emergent approaches to the study of nature. Reflecting contemporary scientific attitudes, Woolf employed the taxonomic method as a symbol of a limited mode of representation while taking disciplines focused on the observation of living organisms as analogies for new methods of seeing and describing life. In place of a literary method focused on exhaustive description in the service of definitive classification, Woolf advocated acceptance of the fact that only fleeting glimpses of a moving subject were possible or, indeed, desirable.

In Birds and Man (1901), the nature writer W. H. Hudson attacks the preoccupation with specimen collection that had long characterised the natural history tradition, describing preserved bird specimens as ‘a falsification and degradation of nature’ and presenting the specimen collector as stricken by ‘the curious delusion that the lustre which we see and admire [in a living bird] is in the case, the coat, the substance which may be grasped, and not in the spirit of life which is within and the atmosphere and miracle-working sunlight which are without’. In place of this artificial preservation, he recommends the observation of living birds in the wild and speaks of the enduring power of his memories of such sightings, ‘this incalculable wealth of images of vanished scenes’.

The opposition that Hudson sets up between the capture of specimens and the observation of living creatures reflects a broad shift in the study of nature that began around the turn of the century, and this shift resonates beyond the study of nature to a change in outlook that characterised Virginia Woolf's literary modernism. Woolf alludes to the study of nature as a means of articulating wider ideas about the perception and description of life. In ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection’, two views of a room and its occupant are juxtaposed.

Due to the unique conditions governing the life sciences in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a result of which stagnation gave way to rapid change, Woolf was familiar with a range of scientific approaches to the study of nature. The lingering influence of the ‘so-called “classics”’ of mid-nineteenth-century popular natural history ensured Woolf's childhood familiarity with the taxonomic tradition in its quintessentially mid-Victorian form; however, rapid changes in the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant that she also witnessed the rise of laboratory biology, ethology, and ecology as alternative means of studying nature. The next two chapters provide the historical and scientific background necessary to understand late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments in and perceptions of the life sciences.

This chapter focuses on the taxonomic tradition of natural history, a necessary point of departure for any discussion of the development of the modern life sciences, for the new disciplines that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries defined themselves against this tradition. The practitioners of the emerging disciplines of this period were inclined to be dismissive of taxonomic work, viewing it as a preoccupation that had impeded the progress of the life sciences in Britain, and this bias in the outlook of Woolf's scientific contemporaries was an important element of the intellectual context in which Woolf's own perceptions of the various disciplines of the life sciences were formed.

Woolf's most frequently cited comment on science is her assertion in Three Guineas that ‘science, it would seem, is not sexless; she is a man, a father, and infected too. Science, thus infected, produced measurements to order’ (TG 360). This declaration has been interpreted by many as a wholesale rejection of science. Sue Curry Jansen, for example, reads this statement as proof of Woolf's conviction that ‘androcentric bias is a constituent principle of the modern, Western, scientific outlook’. Woolf's disdain for the taxonomic tradition, outlined in the last chapter, might be taken as further evidence of such a conviction. However, as is suggested by the fact that even in the above statement she employs a feminine pronoun in her reference to science, Woolf's views on science are more complex than this. It is, after all, to a scientific perspective that Woolf attributes the discovery of the infection in science itself: she praises Professor Grensted as ‘an impartial and scientific operator’ for having ‘dissected the human mind’ and discovered as a result the ‘germ’ of the ‘“infantile fixation”’ (to give the infection ‘[i]ts scientific name’) (341). Not all scientific perspectives appear to Woolf infected by patriarchal bias.

Woolf's dismissal of infected science in Three Guineas is offered specifically as a judgement upon craniology, already by the early twentieth century a discredited science, as demonstrated by Bertrand Russell's comment, cited by Woolf, that ‘[a]nyone … who desires amusement may be advised to look up the tergiversations of eminent craniologists in their attempts to prove from brain measurements that women are stupider than men’ (360).