GOOD OBSERVERS OF NATURE examines the intellectual and aesthetic experience of nature for women in nineteenth-century America and investigates the linguistic, perceptual, and scientific systems that were available to women to describe those experiences. Many women writers of this period used the natural world as a platform for discussing issues of domesticity, education, morality, and the nation. Many—especially those writing in the early part of the century—also adhered to the tenets of natural theology in their representations of nature and accordingly pictured the natural world as a moral space designed by a benevolent deity and given to humans...

IN A 1755 LETTER to botanist John Gronovius, Cadwallader praises the botanical proclivities of his young daughter, Jane:

I thought that Botany is an Amusement which may be made agreable for the Ladies who are often at a loss to fill up their time. . . . I have a daughter who has an inclination to reading & a curiosity for natural phylosophy or natural History & a sufficient capacity for attaining a competent knowledge[.] She is now grown very fond of the study and has made such progress in it as I believe would please you if you saw...

HAD MARGARET FULLER (1810–50) been a student of Almira Phelps, she would have undoubtedly been a thorn in the educator’s side. Fuller would have challenged her teacher’s orderly exposition of the mysteries of nature and the universe and would have demanded to know why details of taxonomy and classification should matter to the thoughtful observer. Mostly, she would have fought the idea that nature tells same story to each individual observer. Phelps took comfort in fixed systems and rigid taxonomy because her world was a place of harmonious interaction between well-defined parts. Fuller found no such solace in her...

IN 1850, Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813–94), the daughter held most dear by James Fenimore Cooper, published Rural Hours, arguably the first seasonal nature journal written by an American woman. In the years prior to the book’s publication, Cooper walked through the woods and fields around her Cooperstown, New York, home. She experienced her world firsthand and recorded all she saw there for the benefit of her reading public. She walked almost daily year round, in foul weather and in fair. On the rare occasions when she could not walk, Cooper availed herself of her father’s extensive library and read...

MARY TREAT (1830–93), a late-nineteenth-century writer and prolific naturalist of the New Jersey pine barrens, was both an inheritor of the trope of nature as home popular earlier in the century and an active participant in a scientific culture radically realigned by the advent of Darwinian evolution. As a writer of popular scientific nature essays, Treat portrayed the world around her small Vineland home as a rich field of inquiry for scientific investigation. In the process she reconfigured and extended the definitions of home and morality to include nonhuman occupants of the natural world according to CharlesDarwin’s terms. “To...

SUSAN FENIMORE COOPER enjoyed success with Rural Hours, as evidenced by the nine editions of the text published between 1850 and 1868. But after the ninth edition, the author substantially emended the book for publication in 1887. This edition looked very little like the Rural Hours of 1850, as Cooper cut more than 40 percent of the original text. By the end of the century, much of what had made her seasonal journal compelling and engaging had landed on the cutting room floor, including many of the long devotional passages and almost all of the passages of biblical exegesis, among...