How to Know the Wild Flowers

Historical Context

Frances Theodora Parsons

After the death of her husband, Frances Theodora Parsons embraced Victorian customs for widows, including the adoption of his name. She also assumed a solitary lifestyle until her friend Marion Satterlee got her to resume taking walks in the countryside. <ref name="Anderson"> She then rediscovered the love for botany that she developed while spending her childhood summers away from New York City in Newburgh, New York. <ref name="Anderson"> Together, the women collected the material for this hugely successful book.<ref name="Anderson"> Parsons later went on to write a column about nature for the New York Tribune (compiled in According to Season (1894)), as well as the successive guide How to Know the Ferns (1899), and a children’s handbook called Plants and Their Children (1896). She gave up naturalist writing when she became very active in the suffrage movement, though she did also publish a memoir entitled Perchance Some Day (1951) just before her death. <ref name="Anderson">