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Book Review
‘Lady of the Butterflies’ by Fiona Mountain
A review by Richard Stewart
This is a long, well written and meticulously researched novel about the life of Eleanor Glanville who, as one biographer recorded, ‘gained great happiness from natural history in the middle of great fear and sorrow ’ . She is of course immortalised by giving her name to the Glanville Fritillary.
The book can simply be enjoyed as a gripping story of life in the un-drained Somerset marshlands after the deeply divisive English Civil War. It features her relationship with her Puritan father, two very different husbands and James Petiver, famous as a pioneer of Lepidoptera studies. It also comments on the very limited legal rights, especially those of inheritance, afforded to women and there is also much study of her varied relationships with the estate workers, particularly after the failed Monmouth rebellion. Eleanor is wilful and determined, a ‘free spirit’ whose pursuits set her at odds with the norms society imposed on the behaviour of ‘genteel’ ladies. She tries to persuade her cook and maid to leave windfalls for feeding butterflies and her rearing of species throughout their life cycle increasingly feeds the rumours about her being a witch and a lunatic.
Her scientific life blossoms when she meets James Petiver, who has an apothecary ’s shop in London. Through him she also gets to know Hans Sloane, John Ray, Sir Francis Bacon and others dedicated to the study of butterflies. Even here she initially has to dress as a boy to get involved. She is then immersed in the early work related to giving butterflies a proper nomenclature, and deciding on the common names of British species that we still use today. There are many passages relating to fieldwork, covering such species as the Swallowtail, Large Copper and the Purple Emperor, and the continuing discoveries related to life cycles and larval food plants. Petiver also has a wide list of very active correspondents and collectors, many abroad.
I won’t divulge the ending but just conclude by saying I thoroughly enjoyed the novel itself and the fascinating and detailed account of the infancy of Lepidoptera studies in our country – and regrettably how much of this has now gone, with many of our rarer species in decline.
Published: Preface, 2009, paperback ISBN 9781848091641
Glanville Fritillary by Mervyn Crawford
