Wild Nature Won by Kindness

Eliza Brightwen was sixty when she published her first book, written from The Grove, her home at Great Stanmore, where twenty years of variable health had made animals her steadiest company. Thirty-one short chapters, a few of them reprinted from The Animal World, mostly follow one creature at a time: Dick the starling, Zoë the nuthatch, Blanche the pigeon, a young cuckoo she found half starved, water shrews, harvest mice, a mole, Roman snails, trap-door spiders, ant-lions, and Sancho the toad. Others explain how to rear birds from the nest, feed them through the year, and watch wild things without scaring them. Her point is plain. Food and shelter alone will not tame anything, and a terrified captive can be dead within hours. She writes as if talking, never lecturing.