A Country Woman's Journal

Brilliant butterflies, songbirds and seabirds, flowers and weeds, bees and bugs: Margaret Shaw records in watercolour and prose the rich flora and fauna of the unspoiled countryside of the 1920s. In Shaw's bucolic world the eaves swarm with housemartins, elm trees still grow tall, and the hedgerows are full of quarrelsome wrens. Travelling widely in Britain and in France and Italy, between October 1926 and December 1928, Shaw chronicled her observations of the landscape in all its weathers and colours: "a glorious sunrise" in Sussex; "a slight fog" in London; and "sullen skies with angry clouds" in the Highlands of Scotland. Evocative vignettes seek to capture the most picturesque of these landscapes.