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A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer
Not yet published
Expected 1 Dec 26'Uglow makes us feel the life beyond the facts.' GUARDIAN
'Few can match Uglow's skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character.' SUNDAY TIMES
'Charming . . . Like Radio 4's shipping forecast for naturalists.' Andrea Wulf, FINANCIAL TIMES
'A glorious celebration of curiosity and nature.'OBSERVER
A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, THE SPECTATOR, FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER AND NEW STATESMAN
In 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate, living in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. Fascinated by the fauna, flora and people around him, he kept journals for many years, and, at that time, was halfway to completing his path-breaking The Natural History of Selborne. No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and his spellbinding book has remained in print ever since, treasured by generations of readers.
Jenny Uglow illuminates this quirky, warm-hearted man, 'the father of ecology', by following a single year in his Naturalist's Journal. As his diary jumps from topic to topic, she accompanies Gilbert from frost to summer drought, from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming of harvest.
Fresh, alive and original - and packed with rich colour illustrations - A Year with Gilbert White invites us to see the natural world anew, with astonishment and wonder.
'A feast of a book, it is beautifully illustrated and compulsively readable.'LITERARY REVIEW
'The author brings her subject endearingly alive . . . [an] enriching book.' NATURE
'Few can match Uglow's skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character.' SUNDAY TIMES
'Charming . . . Like Radio 4's shipping forecast for naturalists.' Andrea Wulf, FINANCIAL TIMES
'A glorious celebration of curiosity and nature.'OBSERVER
A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, THE SPECTATOR, FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER AND NEW STATESMAN
In 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate, living in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. Fascinated by the fauna, flora and people around him, he kept journals for many years, and, at that time, was halfway to completing his path-breaking The Natural History of Selborne. No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and his spellbinding book has remained in print ever since, treasured by generations of readers.
Jenny Uglow illuminates this quirky, warm-hearted man, 'the father of ecology', by following a single year in his Naturalist's Journal. As his diary jumps from topic to topic, she accompanies Gilbert from frost to summer drought, from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming of harvest.
Fresh, alive and original - and packed with rich colour illustrations - A Year with Gilbert White invites us to see the natural world anew, with astonishment and wonder.
'A feast of a book, it is beautifully illustrated and compulsively readable.'LITERARY REVIEW
'The author brings her subject endearingly alive . . . [an] enriching book.' NATURE
480 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication December 1, 2026
20 people are currently reading
273 people want to read
About the author
Jenny Uglow
43 books138 followersJennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther, born 1947) is a British biographer, critic and publisher. The editorial director of Chatto & Windus, she has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled a women's biographical dictionary.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 2, 2025
Gilbert White’s writings have always attracted the best writers. The prime example of which includes Richard Mabey, whose 1986 biography of Gilbert White had always seemed to be the perfect match - observational 20th century naturalist writer reflecting on the life of the 18th century observational naturalist. This book, this time by Jenny Uglow, one of our most gifted literary historians, is an excellent addition to the library on anyone interested in Gilbert White, or indeed anyone who is meeting him for the very first time.
I was delighted to read of its impending arrival when the publisher’s announcements reached the press. Admittedly, Jenny Uglow has always been a favourite author on mine - her biography of William Hogarth being a favourite from twenty five years or more earlier. Gilbert White’s writings had been familiar to me for even longer, The Natural History of Selborne had accompanied me to University some forty year’s ago. So I had to approach this book carefully, there was the fear that this combination could be too good to be true. On such occasions, the time to read it has to be right, the mind and decks cleared and the approach to the book needed care and a setting-aside of time. It soon became clear that this book was going to pass all the tests. Beautifully balanced and clearly written by a master, I have been recommending it to many people.
In particular, this book reflects the writer’s sense of place. Not just her immersion in the eighteenth century world of Selborne, but White’s connection to London and the author’s own reflections on the seasonal changes in Borrowdale in England’s Lake District. I have been lucky enough to spend my life in rural Norfolk, and indeed sometimes in the Lake District, in its gardens and its countryside. An existence which has been enhanced by the observational encouragement of Gilbert White, by Richard Mabey and now, by Jenny Uglow. Jenny’s book is a hugely welcome addition to this devotee of Gilbert White and is highly recommended.
I was delighted to read of its impending arrival when the publisher’s announcements reached the press. Admittedly, Jenny Uglow has always been a favourite author on mine - her biography of William Hogarth being a favourite from twenty five years or more earlier. Gilbert White’s writings had been familiar to me for even longer, The Natural History of Selborne had accompanied me to University some forty year’s ago. So I had to approach this book carefully, there was the fear that this combination could be too good to be true. On such occasions, the time to read it has to be right, the mind and decks cleared and the approach to the book needed care and a setting-aside of time. It soon became clear that this book was going to pass all the tests. Beautifully balanced and clearly written by a master, I have been recommending it to many people.
In particular, this book reflects the writer’s sense of place. Not just her immersion in the eighteenth century world of Selborne, but White’s connection to London and the author’s own reflections on the seasonal changes in Borrowdale in England’s Lake District. I have been lucky enough to spend my life in rural Norfolk, and indeed sometimes in the Lake District, in its gardens and its countryside. An existence which has been enhanced by the observational encouragement of Gilbert White, by Richard Mabey and now, by Jenny Uglow. Jenny’s book is a hugely welcome addition to this devotee of Gilbert White and is highly recommended.
October 3, 2025
This book is an experiment in rhythm. Not just literary rhythm, though Uglow is one of those writers who can bend cadence into scholarship like music, but a deeper tempo: the rhythm of attention.
The book unfolds across a calendar year, following the 18th-century English naturalist Gilbert White as he observes the minutiae of Selborne—swallows swooping, hedges thickening, plants flowering, skies clouding, weather shifting with incremental moods. To read it is to be invited into an almost alien mode of experience: slow, patient, porous. It is, paradoxically, a radical text precisely because it is so unassuming. It returns us to what is most overlooked—the overlooked itself.
Jenny Uglow, whose biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others have shown her gift for making intellectual lives feel tangible, domestic, and lived-in, brings to White the same attentiveness White himself applied to his landscape.
The book is not so much a biography in the conventional sense as it is a montage, a collage, even a curatorial performance. She arranges White’s notes—his records of flora, fauna, weather—alongside contextual explanations, anecdotes about 18th-century rural life, and reflections on how observation itself can be both scientific and spiritual. To read Uglow on White is to discover how noticing the flight of a martin or the color of a field at dusk can be history as much as ornithology, philosophy as much as botany.
And yet, if I am honest, I did not approach this book with the cool detachment of a naturalist. I read it in the noise of Durga Puja, in Kolkata’s streets where pandals bloomed overnight like improbable flowers and where the sacred and the chaotic fused seamlessly. If White’s Selborne was a village slowed down into patient cycles, my environment while reading was a city sped up into intensity—idols carried through crowds, drums thundering, lights flickering like restless fireflies. Strangely, the two modes spoke to each other.
White’s quiet was not the negation of Puja’s intensity but its counterpoint. The goddess, after all, is invoked through flowers, leaves, rivers, soil, and sound—the same textures White observed daily. Where he saw a redstart twitching its tail, I saw marigolds piled like suns at a roadside altar. Where he watched hedgerows thicken, I watched bamboo poles rise into temporary temples. Both are rituals of noticing, and both affirm that life’s richness lies in repeated attention to form.
This is where the postmodern reading comes in. Uglow’s book resists classification: is it a biography, a nature diary, a history of science, a meditation on ecological temporality? It is all of these at once, and thus it reveals the instability of genre itself.
Gilbert White was himself a hybrid figure: parson, naturalist, amateur scientist, proto-ecologist. He is both insider and outsider to the Enlightenment. His parish duties rooted him in tradition, while his relentless recording of data anticipated the modern scientific method.
Uglow curates this doubleness, and the result is a book that is not stable but shimmering—like light on the surface of water. Postmodernism loves these in-between states, these destabilized categories, and so White becomes not merely an 18th-century figure but a mirror of our own fractured epistemologies. We, too, live in an age where categories collapse: science is culture, data is philosophy, nature is politics, observation is resistance.
Uglow’s structural choice—to organize by months, not by chronological events—further complicates the narrative. A biography typically advances along linear time: birth, childhood, adulthood, achievement, death. But Uglow collapses this linearity into cyclical time. January, February, March… the seasons dictate the rhythm, not the milestones of a man’s life.
This is deeply radical. It destabilizes the individual hero as the center of narrative, replacing him with ecology, with weather, with birdsong. In a sense, Gilbert White is not the protagonist at all; Selborne is. The village, with its hedgerows and meadows, its swifts and worms, its frosts and rains, becomes the character that drives the book.
This shift—from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism—is both deeply 18th-century (in the spirit of natural history) and urgently contemporary (in the spirit of climate crisis awareness). Uglow uses White to remind us that the world exceeds the human, that the “main character” of existence is not us but the web of life we inhabit.
As I read, I could not help but think of Puja again. Festivals, like nature diaries, are cyclical. They recur not to repeat the past but to re-mark it, to refresh its meaning. Each year the goddess comes, each year she leaves, each year she is mourned and awaited. White’s swallows return, his plants flower, his frosts crackle, and yet he notes the differences—the earlier arrival of a bird, the heavier snowfall, the subtler coloration of leaves.
It is the same, yet not the same. In Derridean terms, it is différance: repetition with difference. Ritual and record both inscribe time not as a straight line but as a spiral. Puja reminded me of White, White deepened my sense of Puja. Both whisper: the eternal hides in the seasonal.
Uglow, of course, writes with her characteristic clarity. Her sentences are precise, never baroque, but they carry warmth. She never lets White become a mere data machine. She recovers his humanity: his parish duties, his relationships, his personal quirks. She contextualizes him in Enlightenment England, in a world of emerging sciences and shifting cultural attitudes. Yet she does so without suffocating him under theory.
This is the art of biography as accompaniment: she walks with him, not over him. That gentleness is what makes the book not only informative but companionable. I felt, while reading, as though I had two companions: White himself, murmuring about swifts and ferns, and Uglow, interpreting softly, like a guide who knows the terrain but lets you look for yourself.
And here, perhaps, lies the most radical thing about *A Year with Gilbert White*: it restores slowness as a form of knowledge. In our world of acceleration—tweets, scrolls, feeds, instant updates—slowness feels almost rebellious. White sat with a field, with a hedgerow, with a bird, and simply noticed.
His knowledge was cumulative, layered, accretive. He did not rush to the “result.” He cultivated patience. Uglow’s book, by following his rhythm, forces us into that temporality. You cannot binge-read it in the way you might a thriller. You must settle into its cadence. It is almost like prayer—repetitive, meditative, a surrender to rhythm. Reading it during Puja, with the throb of dhaaks in the background, I realized how similar White’s daily notations are to ritual chant. Both are ways of tuning oneself to cycles larger than the self.
From a postmodern vantage, the book also reveals how observation is never innocent. To notice is to interpret, to frame, to inscribe. White was not a “neutral” recorder of nature; he was shaped by his context, by parsonage life, by Enlightenment assumptions, by English rural identity. Uglow acknowledges this, showing how his Selborne is not nature-in-itself but nature-as-seen-through-White.
This self-awareness prevents the book from being naïve pastoralism. It is, instead, an ecology of perspective. White’s Selborne is as much a construct as it is a reality—just as Puja’s goddess is both clay idol and eternal mother, both matter and myth. The postmodern lesson is clear: all “observation” is mediation. And yet, this does not diminish its value. On the contrary, it enriches it, reminding us that every act of seeing is also an act of meaning-making.
The ecological dimension of the book is, of course, inescapable. In the 21st century, to read White is to read through the lens of climate crisis. His records of species, of weather, of seasonal rhythms, become data points in the longue durée.
What he saw as natural recurrence, we now see as fragile continuity. Will the swifts return again? Will the frosts come later? Will the hedgerows thicken or vanish? Uglow does not belabor this point, but it is implicit: White’s diary becomes a baseline against which we measure ecological collapse. His patient noticing becomes prophetic. And thus, to engage with his work today is not only an aesthetic exercise but an ethical one. To notice, in our time, is to resist forgetting, to refuse erasure, to hold the world accountable.
There is also something deeply moving about the ordinariness of White’s concerns. He was not chasing glory, not seeking fame. His observations were local, humble, grounded. And yet, they endured. They matter still. Uglow restores dignity to the small, to the daily, to the overlooked. This, too, is a kind of resistance.
In a culture that prizes spectacle, she insists on attention to the minor. It is a lesson for us, caught as we are in the Puja glare of lights and crowds: the festival is not only in the idol but also in the leaf crushed underfoot, the smoke rising from a small incense stick, the rhythm of footsteps returning home late at night. White reminds us to look down as much as we look up.
By the end of *A Year with Gilbert White*, I found myself less interested in White the man and more attuned to the White within me—the part that could notice, that could slow down, that could dwell. This is Uglow’s real achievement: she does not merely tell us about Gilbert White; she makes us become him, if only briefly.
We carry his gaze, his attentiveness, into our own world. Postmodernism often delights in destabilizing identity, in showing how texts make us other than ourselves. Uglow achieves this gently. We emerge from her book altered, haunted by birdsong, sensitive to weather, tuned to rhythm.
And so the book is not only biography, not only nature writing, not only history. It is performance. It performs the act of attention and asks us to join. It is both text and ritual, both record and invitation. And in reading it during Puja, amid the whirl of color and sound, I realized how powerful that invitation is. The goddess comes once a year, White’s swifts once a year, but both remind us that eternity hides in recurrence. Uglow orchestrates this realization with subtle brilliance.
To call *A Year with Gilbert White* layered would be an understatement. It is a palimpsest: 18th-century observation inscribed beneath 21st-century ecological anxiety, beneath Uglow’s narrative poise, beneath the reader’s own rituals of reading. It is a book about looking, about time, about what it means to belong to a place not by owning it but by noticing it. It is biography as ecology, history as calendar, philosophy as diary. It resists reduction, and that is precisely its power.
Jenny Uglow, through Gilbert White, teaches us something we desperately need: to see, to wait, to dwell. To read her book is to learn how to live with the world, not merely in it.
The book unfolds across a calendar year, following the 18th-century English naturalist Gilbert White as he observes the minutiae of Selborne—swallows swooping, hedges thickening, plants flowering, skies clouding, weather shifting with incremental moods. To read it is to be invited into an almost alien mode of experience: slow, patient, porous. It is, paradoxically, a radical text precisely because it is so unassuming. It returns us to what is most overlooked—the overlooked itself.
Jenny Uglow, whose biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others have shown her gift for making intellectual lives feel tangible, domestic, and lived-in, brings to White the same attentiveness White himself applied to his landscape.
The book is not so much a biography in the conventional sense as it is a montage, a collage, even a curatorial performance. She arranges White’s notes—his records of flora, fauna, weather—alongside contextual explanations, anecdotes about 18th-century rural life, and reflections on how observation itself can be both scientific and spiritual. To read Uglow on White is to discover how noticing the flight of a martin or the color of a field at dusk can be history as much as ornithology, philosophy as much as botany.
And yet, if I am honest, I did not approach this book with the cool detachment of a naturalist. I read it in the noise of Durga Puja, in Kolkata’s streets where pandals bloomed overnight like improbable flowers and where the sacred and the chaotic fused seamlessly. If White’s Selborne was a village slowed down into patient cycles, my environment while reading was a city sped up into intensity—idols carried through crowds, drums thundering, lights flickering like restless fireflies. Strangely, the two modes spoke to each other.
White’s quiet was not the negation of Puja’s intensity but its counterpoint. The goddess, after all, is invoked through flowers, leaves, rivers, soil, and sound—the same textures White observed daily. Where he saw a redstart twitching its tail, I saw marigolds piled like suns at a roadside altar. Where he watched hedgerows thicken, I watched bamboo poles rise into temporary temples. Both are rituals of noticing, and both affirm that life’s richness lies in repeated attention to form.
This is where the postmodern reading comes in. Uglow’s book resists classification: is it a biography, a nature diary, a history of science, a meditation on ecological temporality? It is all of these at once, and thus it reveals the instability of genre itself.
Gilbert White was himself a hybrid figure: parson, naturalist, amateur scientist, proto-ecologist. He is both insider and outsider to the Enlightenment. His parish duties rooted him in tradition, while his relentless recording of data anticipated the modern scientific method.
Uglow curates this doubleness, and the result is a book that is not stable but shimmering—like light on the surface of water. Postmodernism loves these in-between states, these destabilized categories, and so White becomes not merely an 18th-century figure but a mirror of our own fractured epistemologies. We, too, live in an age where categories collapse: science is culture, data is philosophy, nature is politics, observation is resistance.
Uglow’s structural choice—to organize by months, not by chronological events—further complicates the narrative. A biography typically advances along linear time: birth, childhood, adulthood, achievement, death. But Uglow collapses this linearity into cyclical time. January, February, March… the seasons dictate the rhythm, not the milestones of a man’s life.
This is deeply radical. It destabilizes the individual hero as the center of narrative, replacing him with ecology, with weather, with birdsong. In a sense, Gilbert White is not the protagonist at all; Selborne is. The village, with its hedgerows and meadows, its swifts and worms, its frosts and rains, becomes the character that drives the book.
This shift—from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism—is both deeply 18th-century (in the spirit of natural history) and urgently contemporary (in the spirit of climate crisis awareness). Uglow uses White to remind us that the world exceeds the human, that the “main character” of existence is not us but the web of life we inhabit.
As I read, I could not help but think of Puja again. Festivals, like nature diaries, are cyclical. They recur not to repeat the past but to re-mark it, to refresh its meaning. Each year the goddess comes, each year she leaves, each year she is mourned and awaited. White’s swallows return, his plants flower, his frosts crackle, and yet he notes the differences—the earlier arrival of a bird, the heavier snowfall, the subtler coloration of leaves.
It is the same, yet not the same. In Derridean terms, it is différance: repetition with difference. Ritual and record both inscribe time not as a straight line but as a spiral. Puja reminded me of White, White deepened my sense of Puja. Both whisper: the eternal hides in the seasonal.
Uglow, of course, writes with her characteristic clarity. Her sentences are precise, never baroque, but they carry warmth. She never lets White become a mere data machine. She recovers his humanity: his parish duties, his relationships, his personal quirks. She contextualizes him in Enlightenment England, in a world of emerging sciences and shifting cultural attitudes. Yet she does so without suffocating him under theory.
This is the art of biography as accompaniment: she walks with him, not over him. That gentleness is what makes the book not only informative but companionable. I felt, while reading, as though I had two companions: White himself, murmuring about swifts and ferns, and Uglow, interpreting softly, like a guide who knows the terrain but lets you look for yourself.
And here, perhaps, lies the most radical thing about *A Year with Gilbert White*: it restores slowness as a form of knowledge. In our world of acceleration—tweets, scrolls, feeds, instant updates—slowness feels almost rebellious. White sat with a field, with a hedgerow, with a bird, and simply noticed.
His knowledge was cumulative, layered, accretive. He did not rush to the “result.” He cultivated patience. Uglow’s book, by following his rhythm, forces us into that temporality. You cannot binge-read it in the way you might a thriller. You must settle into its cadence. It is almost like prayer—repetitive, meditative, a surrender to rhythm. Reading it during Puja, with the throb of dhaaks in the background, I realized how similar White’s daily notations are to ritual chant. Both are ways of tuning oneself to cycles larger than the self.
From a postmodern vantage, the book also reveals how observation is never innocent. To notice is to interpret, to frame, to inscribe. White was not a “neutral” recorder of nature; he was shaped by his context, by parsonage life, by Enlightenment assumptions, by English rural identity. Uglow acknowledges this, showing how his Selborne is not nature-in-itself but nature-as-seen-through-White.
This self-awareness prevents the book from being naïve pastoralism. It is, instead, an ecology of perspective. White’s Selborne is as much a construct as it is a reality—just as Puja’s goddess is both clay idol and eternal mother, both matter and myth. The postmodern lesson is clear: all “observation” is mediation. And yet, this does not diminish its value. On the contrary, it enriches it, reminding us that every act of seeing is also an act of meaning-making.
The ecological dimension of the book is, of course, inescapable. In the 21st century, to read White is to read through the lens of climate crisis. His records of species, of weather, of seasonal rhythms, become data points in the longue durée.
What he saw as natural recurrence, we now see as fragile continuity. Will the swifts return again? Will the frosts come later? Will the hedgerows thicken or vanish? Uglow does not belabor this point, but it is implicit: White’s diary becomes a baseline against which we measure ecological collapse. His patient noticing becomes prophetic. And thus, to engage with his work today is not only an aesthetic exercise but an ethical one. To notice, in our time, is to resist forgetting, to refuse erasure, to hold the world accountable.
There is also something deeply moving about the ordinariness of White’s concerns. He was not chasing glory, not seeking fame. His observations were local, humble, grounded. And yet, they endured. They matter still. Uglow restores dignity to the small, to the daily, to the overlooked. This, too, is a kind of resistance.
In a culture that prizes spectacle, she insists on attention to the minor. It is a lesson for us, caught as we are in the Puja glare of lights and crowds: the festival is not only in the idol but also in the leaf crushed underfoot, the smoke rising from a small incense stick, the rhythm of footsteps returning home late at night. White reminds us to look down as much as we look up.
By the end of *A Year with Gilbert White*, I found myself less interested in White the man and more attuned to the White within me—the part that could notice, that could slow down, that could dwell. This is Uglow’s real achievement: she does not merely tell us about Gilbert White; she makes us become him, if only briefly.
We carry his gaze, his attentiveness, into our own world. Postmodernism often delights in destabilizing identity, in showing how texts make us other than ourselves. Uglow achieves this gently. We emerge from her book altered, haunted by birdsong, sensitive to weather, tuned to rhythm.
And so the book is not only biography, not only nature writing, not only history. It is performance. It performs the act of attention and asks us to join. It is both text and ritual, both record and invitation. And in reading it during Puja, amid the whirl of color and sound, I realized how powerful that invitation is. The goddess comes once a year, White’s swifts once a year, but both remind us that eternity hides in recurrence. Uglow orchestrates this realization with subtle brilliance.
To call *A Year with Gilbert White* layered would be an understatement. It is a palimpsest: 18th-century observation inscribed beneath 21st-century ecological anxiety, beneath Uglow’s narrative poise, beneath the reader’s own rituals of reading. It is a book about looking, about time, about what it means to belong to a place not by owning it but by noticing it. It is biography as ecology, history as calendar, philosophy as diary. It resists reduction, and that is precisely its power.
Jenny Uglow, through Gilbert White, teaches us something we desperately need: to see, to wait, to dwell. To read her book is to learn how to live with the world, not merely in it.
October 13, 2025
I found this to be such a fascinating read - I was unaware of Gilbert White and his work beginning from 1781 (shame on me!) but reading this book has made me intrigued to read his work and look more into the diaries he kept on the goings on/nature in Selbourne during the many years he kept detailed notes.
The author of this book has presented his life and work in a really easy to digest compilation, taking us through the diary entries month by month, alongside that of the history going on at the time and how the people were living. I found myself fascinated by how so much of his notetaking shows how life was so different in some ways back then, but so similar in other aspects to that of life now. It really does bring the past to life and his eye for detail was staggering so it's like he never missed any detail whether it was to do with the natural world, the weather conditions and the social changes going on as well as personal information surrounding his family and friends.
Gilbert White kept his diaries for over 40 years and it's wonderful to see photos of the extracts used alongside images of the area and of wildlife and as a birdwatcher, I loved to read his notes on the birdlife he sees in the area. He also wrote many detailed letters and I just love his thirst for knowing what was going on.
It's one of those books that makes you look at day to day life very differently and to notice the small things, as Gilbert White did all those years ago, and I found it to be a lovely calming read! highly recommended!
The author of this book has presented his life and work in a really easy to digest compilation, taking us through the diary entries month by month, alongside that of the history going on at the time and how the people were living. I found myself fascinated by how so much of his notetaking shows how life was so different in some ways back then, but so similar in other aspects to that of life now. It really does bring the past to life and his eye for detail was staggering so it's like he never missed any detail whether it was to do with the natural world, the weather conditions and the social changes going on as well as personal information surrounding his family and friends.
Gilbert White kept his diaries for over 40 years and it's wonderful to see photos of the extracts used alongside images of the area and of wildlife and as a birdwatcher, I loved to read his notes on the birdlife he sees in the area. He also wrote many detailed letters and I just love his thirst for knowing what was going on.
It's one of those books that makes you look at day to day life very differently and to notice the small things, as Gilbert White did all those years ago, and I found it to be a lovely calming read! highly recommended!
January 13, 2026
Invariably, Jenny Uglow picks great subjects for her books, and so it is with this one. A great book about one of my favourite books and its creator.
January 24, 2026
A joy to read ... and beautifully illustrated.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews