Women Authors From England

"Owing to their lack of and inability to utilize , the stood out as possessing a mode of life fundamentally different from that of green plants. Observations by Pasteur in 1860 and 1862, by in 1879 and 1883, and by in 1883 all showed the former could use a great variety of carbon compounds as food materials."

"As an important member of the flora of Northern Europe, ' is commonly associated with s of a definite type, especially when it occurs as the dominant or sub-dominant species of moorland associations. As such, it is especially characterists of dry heath soils, deficient in and often ."

"A fresh attempt to survey the whole field and correlate the problems of nutrition presented by mycorrhiza plants with those in parasites and insectivorous plants was made by at the opening of the new century (Stahl, 1900). This paper, the most comprehensive study of mycorrhiza from the biological point of view since the publication of 's theory of in trees, has been freely quoted in the text-books and is probably one of the best-known contributions to the literature of the subject. Two aspects of Stahl's work demand attention: firstly, the new hypothesis put forward by him to explain the distribution of fungus infection in s and its beneficial effect upon the hosts, and secondly, the character of the experimental evidence offered in support of his opinions."

"In Trees and Toadstools, Rayner has given us an account, written in clear language understandable to the layman interested in science, of the symbiotic relationship which has been found to prevail between the of many of the higher fungi and forest trees. ... the story of 's epochal discoveries, originally initiated as a project to increase the supply of s but resulting in the real opening of research on the important field of forest tree root and fungus association, is well told in simple language."

"1 Hypogeous are those soil fungi which produce macroscopic partially or completely embedded in soil or humus. While showing a superficial similarity correlated with habitat, they include members of the , and . 2 The edible s have been known from very early times, and speculations as to their nature are found in Greek and Roman literature. Other groups, which are not edible, were described later. The monographs of (1831, 1842) and & (1851) are the starting-point for all modern work on these fungi."

"The are remarkable for diversity of both form and function. Their ability to break down and to synthesize complex substances largely accounts for their success in colonizing widely different habitats, and has them of the greatest economic importance as parasites, as s in the soil and on varied commercial products, and as the producers of s, organic acids and other substances useful to man."

"' is a large genus of which one of the best known species is ', a destructive parasite of , but including also species parasitic on economically valuable trees, such as , and many s."

"The rusts are highly specialised obligate parasites of s, s and s. The cereal rusts are amon the most destructive pathogens of economic plants ..."

"Recent of ancient human remains revealed that, across Europe at least, farming was spread by the physical movement of people, not the dissemination of ideas. Scientists can trace the DNA of , over multiple generations, as they slowly made their way around the coast and into mainland Europe, mixing with local groups as they went. And, by around 4000 BCE Neolithic farmers had finally reached Britain."

"We have sheep to thank for the invention of . Very early sheep farmers tried many different methods for removing wool, some more painful for the sheep than others. Plucking (also called rooing), tearing and combing out would are mentioned in n texts from the late third millennium ... ( is still harvested by combing in China), while modern comparison from traditional shepherding communities suggest that some farmers may have cut the wool off using knives — shepherds in Nepal still use a curved, sickle-like knife ..."

"In Europe, nearly one in ten species of wild s faces extinction, and in the US about a quarter of all wild bees have disappeared in the past ten years alone. s of all kinds — bees, butterflies, moths and other bugs — are showing declines worldwide and although not all species are threatened (some are even improving their numbers), the overall picture is alarming."

"s are one of the few birds to have benefited, at least initially, from human activities. When , the barn owl managed to exploit the new that was created when forests were cleared to grow food. Not only did the absence of trees make it easier for barn owls to access open ground but the presence of s actually boosted the number of s scuttling around on the ground. And although barn owls originally evolved to nest in cliff cavities and tree hollows, human settlements, with their churches, farms and other buildings, offered an enticing array of places to roost and raise a family."

"Of all the deep burrowers, the best known is the Common earthworm ('). This is the 's friend — also known as the lob worm, the night crawler, the granddaddy worm and the dew worm — and is the largest naturally occurring earthworm across most of Europe (around 9–30 centimetres). The body of the Common earthworm can be as thick as a pencil and its tail can be flattened into a paddle shape, to help the earthworm grip the sides of its burrow."

"Nature never ceases to amaze me. I often describe my writing as the intersection between nature, people and history — I'm fascinated by the relationship between us, our , and how that has changed over the centuries. In many ways, that relationship is more sophisticated than it has ever been — we now know so many things about how the natural world works. And yet, something has also been lost. Unlike our ancestors, few of us could, with any confidence, recognize the plants in a typical or name more than a handful of birds that visit our gardens. Key moments that once defined the year, such as s, solstices or natural signs of seasonal change, have also lost their meaning."

"Yorkshire-based Sally has put together a compendium of s, including the new, the old and the forgotten. The book is a thing of beauty itself and includes illustrations by printmaker Louise Lockart. It’s also a fascinating read and serves as inspiration for those who love making things. Sally covers everything from why craft matters and endangered crafts to maker spaces and how to make a living from your hobby. Alongside this, she delves into the details of over 70 crafts, from trug making to globe making and crochetdermy, and hopes this will encourage readers to try something new."

"If you visited your and told him you were suffering from a broken heart, what do you think he would prescribe? s? ? Or would he just tell you to go home and stop wasting his time?"

"In the book Biophilia, designer and best-selling author, Sally Coulthard, demonstrates how to transform your living and working spaces into places that put you in touch with nature. The illustrated guide covers key elements for the ‘biophilic home’, including sounds, s, views, colour and natural light. Each section explores the links between home, health and happiness, drawing on environmental research and while making practical suggestions for bringing the natural world into your home."

"For us, as kids, snow was synonymous with fun. Snow meant speed, exhilaration, and toppling laughter. Snow gave us the freedom to fight, slide, crash, and make a mess, without the fear of a scolding. Snow put a wrench in the works, stopped the numbing timetable of school lessons and stealing an extra day of free time."

"Hugh Walpole was tutor to Elizabeth's children during her time at , as was E.M. Forster, who was a Cambridge friend of Elizabeth's nephew, . In later years, Forster was to recall his inconspicuous arrival at the , 'his average welcome' ... by the von Arnims, as well as his genuine appreciation of Elizabeth 'as a writer'. ... Though he also insisted that personally, the two, 'were never — or almost never! — in sympathy'. ..."

"... Whether in or New York, London or , von Arnim’s settings almost always tell the reader about the insufferable constraints placed upon the women who inhabit them. Elizabeth von Arnim was also brilliant at men, or rather at skewering their behaviour, usually with the help of outlandish names. Married men, in particular, are targeted as they ignore their wives, whine about their misfortunes, or want fish for breakfast. They also lie, cheat, bully, and diminish. Von Arnim made frequent and barely disguised use of the men in her life. The husband of Elizabeth and her German Garden, based closely on her own, is referred to as ‘the Man of Wrath’, a bald-faced hint that, for all of its delights, Elizabeth was only superficially a book about gardens. Subsequent lovers, including H.G. Wells and publisher (thirty years her junior), also became fodder for her fiction. So did her second husband, , brother of the more famous Bertrand and a human bulldozer who pursued von Arnim in various forms for perceived damages long after their separation. Von Arnim tended to hide such unpleasantness under the guise of humour, at which she was unequivocally brilliant (P.G. Wodehouse must surely have been inspired by her novels). Clergy, relatives, dogs, and toddlers all come with laugh-out-loud descriptions, while her skill at satire rests upon ruthlessly close observation filtered through playful, often inventive language or placed in biting juxtaposition. But underneath – whether taking aim at dismissive doctors or overbearing fathers or the bizarre niceties of the – bristles a bitterness that goes beyond the waspishness of say, Muriel Spark, as von Arnim exposes the societal structures used to limit the autonomy and opportunity of her female characters."

"Elizabeth von Arnim is probably best remembered as the author of ' (1898) and ' (1922), and as the elder cousin of Katherine Mansfield. In recent times, fresh scholarship has begun has begun to reinstate van Arnim into the cultural milieu of which she was a significant part, while research into the complex relationship between Mansfield and her cousin has done much to shed light on the familial, personal and literary connections between these unlikely friends. ... Although their lives appeared to be very different (Mansfield's largely one of penurious poor health, von Arnim's chiefly one of robust privilege), we know each experienced the other's influential presence. They read and commented on each other's work, and Manfield's critical assessments became part of the widespread reception of von Arnim's writing, while von Arnim's skill as as an author seeped into her cousin's youthful aspirations and into her firs collection of stories, ' (1911)."

"Beauty; beauty. What was the good of beauty, once it was over? It left nothing behind it but acid regrets, and no heart at all to start fresh. Nearly everything else left something."

""... I haven't had much time to think, have I? But I can't stay here," said Jen quickly ... "There isn't room for two women in this house. It simply wouldn't hold us both." No; that was precisely what he had been thinking. Though he never, being a decent father, would have said so, it was perfectly true. The house, except extremely awkwardly, couldn't hold them both. No house had yet been built which could hold, in peace and comfort, a maiden daughter approaching middle age, and a young second wife. But that Jennifer should see this at once, and clearly, was the last thing he had dreamed of."

"Still, she did seem to have shrunk. Now why should she have shrunk? he wondered, aggrieved. He hadn't; quite the contrary. However, he mustn't mind. She was Fanny, presently to be his Fanny, and he mustn't mind any little alterations. What he did mind mind was that, like Soames, she appeared not to recognize him. She soon would, though, he told himself; and he went over to her determined and confident, lifted her unresisting hand, kissed it with all the fervor of happy reunion, and said with what he felt was immense tact and presence of mind, "I would have known you anywhere." Fanny was much too astonished to speak. She stared at the head bent over her hand. Who was this bald man?"

"Looking out of the club window into —hers was an economical club, but convenient for , where she lived, and for 's, where she shopped—Mrs. Wilkins, having stood there for some time very drearily, her mind's eye on the Mediterranean in April, and the , and the enviable opportunities of the rich, while her bodily eye watched the really falling steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing , suddenly wondered whether this was not the rainy day Mellersh—Mellersh was Mr. Wilkins—had so often encouraged her to prepare for, and whether to get out of such a climate and into the small mediaeval castle wasn't perhaps what had all along intended her to do with her savings. Part of her savings, of course; perhaps quite a small part."

"Once I knew a bishop rather intimately—oh, nothing that wasn't most creditable to us both—and he said to me, "Dear child, you will always be happy if you are good." I'm afraid he couldn't have been quite candid, or else he was very inexperienced, for I have never been so terribly good in the bishop's sense as these last three years—turning my back on every private wish, dreadfully unselfish, devoted, a perfect monster of goodness. And unhappiness went with me every step of the way."

"Father ... appeared to take it for granted that his daughter would continue about him as before, side by side with his new wife, on the ground that homes were the natural places for maiden daughters; and when she reminded him that she was thirty-three, he merely inquired with acerbity, for in his heart he was thinking that she ought to have been married and out of the way long ago, whether being thirty-three altered the fact that she was a maiden daughter."

"Father was very pleasant indeed, if faintly apologetic — not embarrassed, for he was never that, but there was a faint flavour of apology in his manner, which was perhaps not to be wondered at, since his new wife was ever so much younger, one could see at once, than his daughter, and he sixty-five. "You mustn't think, Jennifer," he said after , which had been the oddest meal of her life, as he called her into the back diningroom where protected by folding doors from anything that might be going on in the front one, they had worked together so long — she the obedient handmaid waiting on his thoughts, taking them down as they emerged from him, typing and retyping them, over and over again with dogged patience typing a single paragraph, a single sentence, sometimes for days working on a single sentence till it was, in father's eyes, as near perfect as it could humanly be got, — "you mustn't think, Jennifer," he said, "that I've sprung this on you unfairly.""

"You see, what has happened has taken away my faith in goodness—I don't know who you are that I keep on wanting to tell things to, but I must talk and tell you. Yes; that it is what it has done; and the hurt goes too far down to be healed. Yet I know time is a queer, wholesome thing. I've lived long enough to have found that out. It is very sanitary. It cleans up everything. It never fails to sterilize and purify."

"What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don't what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I fell as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily."

"... Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushion and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, It is Bozzy who asserts that in the country the only things that make him happy are meals."

"She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a pleasant laugh, and limbs were long and slender. Certainly she ought to have been enjoying herself. Instead, she wasted her time in that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule restricted, among women, to the elderly and plain."

"By the time she was twenty-four, nearly all the girls who had when she did were married, and she felt as though she were a ghost haunting the s of a younger generation."

"Pitied? Horrid thought. The great thing in life was to be so situated that you can pity others. But to be pitied yourself?"

"Behold this ruin! 'Twas a skull Once of ethereal spirit full! This narrow cell was Life's retreat; This place was Thought's mysterious seat! What beauteous pictures fill'd that spot, What dreams of pleasure, long forgot! Nor Love, nor Joy, nor Hope, nor Fear, Has left one trace, one record here."

"Another small bird that has to find shelter these winter nights is the , or 'Jenny Wren' as we call it in the countryside, and it likes snug quarters, a really good place being often patronised by several birds. A hayrick is a popular dormitory."

"There are many ferocious predators in the , such as that carnivorous monster the and the bloodthirsty , with its equally predatory grub."

"The , that common small hawk, may also be known and instantly distinguished from the — which is more of a woodland bird — by it manner of hovering in the air. The sparrow-hawk glides along, dashes round bushes, sweeps over a hedge and disappears; but the kestrel mounts to a fair height, quivers its wings, spreads its tail like a fan and hangs poised in mid-arie for what seems to the watcher a considerable time. It is watching for s in the herbage below."

"Glorious with the hues of the , a living gem of colour that seems strangely out of place beside our quiet English rivers and babbling streams, the kingfisher is well and aptly names, for it is indeed clad in royal robes, a very king of birds and a prince of fishers. There is no bird on the to compare with it for brilliance of colouring, but of its hues bird-books give us little idea."

"The Greater Spotted, like all the woodpeckers, lays pure white eggs, with the faintest flush of pink from the yolk showing through the thin shell. The colourlessness of tis eggs is a characteristic that the woodpecker shares in common with most other birds that nest in holes and dark places. Colour in eggs is usually associated with exposed nesting sites, and apparently serves to camouflage the dainty morsels from the hungry gaze of the many creatures that are always ready to raid a nest. In a dark hole colour is useless, and it is a significant fact that the eggs of the majority of birds that nest in holes are white."

"... has no place beneath the trees nor where the fresh winds blow. Hunt and be hunted is the rule of wild life."

"It is because they kill the tiresome mice that people should not shoot, or trap, or allow the eggs to be taken, of hawks and owls. Owls, and the in particular, live almost entirely on mice and young rats, and when we kill a (the barn owl is the white owl which files about so silently over the fields) we are allowing hundreds of mice to live and thrive and eat our things."

"Though the whole trend of modern scientific thought is to lay stress on the fact that animals differ from us in degree rather than in kind, yet the moment we go out into the open the widespread fear, the overwhelming horror, that most undomesticated creatures display at the approach of a human being, the panic with which nearly all flee, show what an awful and fearsome thing he is to them. Man is an object of horror, the dealer of death and destruction, with which they have nothing whatsoever in common. The wild animals that one moment were feeding happily in company with horses and cattle, the rabbits nibbling the grass, the starlings perching on the beasts' backs, or hopping in and out between their legs, have fled for their lives at the mere sound of a human footfall."

"The are undoubtedly direct descendants of the " forest bulls " of Norman times, but we have no evidence to prove, and a good deal to disprove, that these were the aboriginal wild cattle. The animals which roamed about the country in the Middle Ages, and which evidently were wild and fierce enough, were not the original indigenous species, the that was common during the , but merely " gone wild " or feral beasts that had escaped from domestication. Far from being of pure primigenius descent, they were certainly related to the tiny Bos longifrons, otherwise the Celtic shorthorn. This was the domestic breed of the Neolithic and early Celtic peoples. The existing , and are its descendants. It was the only domestic ox known in these islands up to the time of the Romans, but afterwards became mixed with larger breeds of the Urus type that were brought over by the Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, etc."

", to say a person "carries the horn" signifies that he hunts the pack. It is often said of a that he "carries the horn," meaning that he acts as , or contrawise that he "does not carry the horn" which means he employs a huntsman to hunt hounds for him."

"A faire woman is a paradise to the eye, a purgatorye to the purse, and a hell to the soule."

"There be foure good mothers have foure bad daughters: Trueth hath Hatred; Prosperity hath Pride; Security hath Perill; and Familiarity hath Contempt."

"The right Education of the Female Sex, as it is in a manner every where neglected, so it ought to be generally lamented. Most in this depraved later Age think a Woman learned and wise enough if she can distinguish her Husbands Bed from anothers."

"Crush the serpent in the head, Break ill egs yer they be hatched. Kill bad chickens in the tread, Fledge[d] they hardly can be catched. In the rising stifle ill, Lest it grow against thy will."

"Life is not all incident; it has its intervals of thought, as well as action—of feeling—of endurance; and in order to reflect, and profit by these, it is sometimes necessary to sit down as it were upon the sand-hills of the desert, and consider from what point in the horizon the journey has been made, or to what opening in the distance it is likely to lead."