How to Know the Wild Flowers
Introduction
How to Know the Wild Flowers: a Guide to the Names, Haunts, and Habits of our Common Wild Flowers by Mrs. William Starr Dana (illustrated by Marion Satterlee and Elsie Louise Shaw) was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York, NY in 1893. The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania obtained a copy of the 1903 reprint edition as part of the Fritz Blank Culinary Archive and Library in 2008.
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.[2] She also assumed a solitary lifestyle until her friend Marion Satterlee got her to resume taking walks in the countryside. [2] She then rediscovered the love for botany that she developed while spending her childhood summers away from New York City in Newburgh, New York. [2] Together, the women collected the material for this hugely successful book.[2] 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. [2]
19th-Century Women's Botanical Writings
Textual Analysis
Paratexts
Body Text
Imagery
Material Analysis
Substrate
Marginalia
Insertions
Readership
References
- ↑ “How to Know the Wild Flowers: A Guide to the Names, Haunts and Habits of Our Common Wild Flowers.” Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/405911.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Anderson, Lorraine. Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry about Nature. Vintage Books, 2003.
- ↑ Raymo, Chet. The Path: A One-Mile Walk through the Universe. Walker & Company, 2003.
- ↑ Fitzpatrick, John Thomas. “Cultivating and Preserving American Wild Flowers, 1890–1965.” Cornell University, 2006.
- ↑ Parsons, Frances Theodora. How to Know the Wild Flowers: A Guide to the Name, Haunts, and Habits of Our Common Wild Flowers. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903.
- ↑ Stauffer, Andrew. Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
- ↑ Report of the Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Meeting of the Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf. United States Government Printing Office, 1929.