Review Eva Meijer. Bird Cottage Pushkin Press. Translated from the Dutch by Antoinette Fawcett
I always enjoy books about women who break the mould which was what attracted me to this one. I particular enjoy books which dwell on the study of nature since those are increasingly invaluable records of what we are losing .
The title is taken from the name of a house in Ditchling, Sussex in which the naturalist Len (Gwendolen) Howard lived and wrote from 1938 books on birds, based on years of living with them and closely observing their behaviours. Meijer’s book is partly fictional, partly biographical based on Howard’s letters and archive.
Born in the early years of the 20th century to a poet father and depressed mother Howard gave up an early career as a violinist and the possibility of marriage in order to live alone and write about her birds. At least this is how the book presents her.
This reimagining of her life brings to light her struggles to be taken seriously as a naturalist – well it was the early part of the twentieth century and she was (a) a woman and (b) not a formally trained scientist.
Howard notes in her letters:
“Konrad Lorenz’s book in which he describes how he lives with all kinds of animals, is treated far more seriously that mine, probably because he has proper qualifications, writes scientific articles, is a man. Yet his observations are less original than mine. Moreover the birds have freely chosen to live with me whereas Lorenz rears his and so influences their behaviour.“
The factual elements of the book are interesting for observations on animal behaviour such as:
“Darwin’s work on animal intelligence, for example, is regarded as unscientific because it is primarily based on anecdotal evidence. Behaviourism, however, does not properly take account of the fact that many animals behave differently in captivity than when they are free.”
Yet I found some of the dialogue slow moving and unconvincing which may be a result of translation, the evocation of period a bit clunky.
“Cook rings the bell. Tea is ready. I go upstairs to put away my violin. Mike is singing in the garden. Ta-da-da, tada.”
There’s not much sense of the history against which the story is set – a brief mention of some suffragettes and force feeding “it must be dreadful”. Gwen recognises a soldier as “one of the chaps Kingsley used to play tennis with”. The second world war gets barely a mention.
Gwen’s character comes across as completely self-absorbed, out of touch with her family -she fails to attend her own father’s funeral – and certainly out of touch with the momentous events that shook the world through the first half of the twentieth century. She’s not the most empathetic of characters but obviously the birds like her. The author writes in a note that Howard’s books Birds as Individuals and Living with Birds were once best sellers, but now only available second hand.
I understand that the intention may have been to show that this is what it took to live life on your own terms for a woman. If so I’m not entirely sure it worked for me. I felt I did not know the character any better by the end of the book than at the beginning.
Sadly the author tells us that Howard left Bird Cottage in her will to the Sussex Naturalist Trust who promised to turn it into a bird sanctuary. This never materialised and the land was sold to someone who felled all the trees in the back garden, apart from a single oak.
Thank you to #PushkinPress and #NetGalley for this review copy.
