September 29, 2022

Woman, Watching, by Merilyn Simonds

I LOVED this book! Louise de Kiriline Lawrence is the most fascinating woman I’d never heard of, born to Swedish aristocracy, goddaughter of the Queen of Denmark, trained as a Red Cross nurse in WW1, which is how she met her Russian husband, whom she followed into a post-revolutionary Soviet Union beset by civil war, and then he was eventually killed by the Bolsheviks, and in the aftermath of that loss, she emigrates to Canada to begin nursing in Northern Ontario, where she becomes the nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets during their first year of life…all this taking up just 64 pages in a book that runs for 300 more.

Because after those extraordinary formative experiences, according to Merilyn Simonds in biography Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay, is where the real story begins, Lawrence buying a rural property where she builds a log cabin (without plumbing or electricity) and becoming one of the foremost ornithologists of her time, thanks to her own powers of observation and correspondence with other bird experts who informed her ideas. She’s able to note effects of habitat loss and other human interference before Rachel Carson became well known or celebrated, build support and information networks with other women birders, and write six books, many articles and magazine stories, and a foundational monograph on woodpeckers.

Born into affluence, Lawrence’s early years of hardship would have primed her to be resourceful and grateful for small pleasures, but even still, her strength and stoicism were remarkable—there is a part where she ventures into the bush to find moss with which to insulate her windows for her unheated cabin, and then she falls and dislocates her shoulder, but (as she reports cheerfully to her correspondent—she was also a prolific letter writer, fortunately for her biographer!) she was able to push the joint back into place AND ended up getting some of the best moss she’d ever gathered.

In some ways, this story of Lawrence’s cabin near North Bay reminded me of Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, with the city ever encroaching, growing closer. It’s also a story of the North American Conservation movement (some parts of this mapping beautifully with Michelle Nijhuis’s Beloved Beasts, another book I loved), of discrimination against women in science, of changes to science so that amateur observers have less to contribute, of the struggles in the career of a writer, and the perils of growing old, but most of all, it’s a story about birds, and what we might see if pay attention to the world around us, of the wonders and miracles of the natural world.