The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady

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But that never happens… No revelations about the woman or her family have come forth, nor has a single piece of Edith’s artwork. I suppose it is very quiet at Dousland now, all the visitors will be leaving, that is just the time I would like to be there. She became famous following the posthumous publication of her Nature Notes for 1906, in facsimile form, as the book The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady in 1977, which was an enormous publishing success.

A quick read about Edith Holden who lived a relatively simple life and died in her late 40s of a tragic and silly drowning accident. In 1911 Edith Holden, at the age of thirty-nine, married Ernest Smith, a sculptor, seven years her junior.In January, for instance, she records that the month was ‘named from the Roman god Janus, who is represented with his faces looking in opposite directions – as retrospective to the past, and prospective to the coming year. This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. I had not known just how much art training Holden had had; she had attended art school in Birmingham since childhood and exhibited pictures regularly at exhibits there and at the Royal Academy in London; this was not just a typical upper class woman who happened to keep a nature journal. There were great battles among the tits over the cocoa-nut, and once a robin got right into it and refused to let the Tits approach, until he had had all he wanted.

All the charm and beauty of the original remains intact in this facsimile, with Holden's carefully handwritten favorite poems, personal thoughts, observations of the wildlife she saw in her native Warwickshire; and remarks on her travels throughout England and Scotland. The author's gentle yet astute observations of the natural world around her have always captivated me. This is a thoroughly charming and lovely diary, filled with gorgeous paintings and delightful observations of the English countryside around the turn of last century. This book brings in her family history, paintings and illustrations she did for books and magazines, and puts a face to the "Edwardian Lady".

It was not until the next morning that he learned that her body had been found at six o'clock on the Tuesday morning.

I've never owned a copy of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, but when I picked it up and began to read Edith Holden's nature observations and take in her beautiful watercolour paintings, I felt such a deep sense of nostalgia, like I'd found an old friend. The book’s introduction begins: ‘It is ironic that Edith Holden’s fame rests not on the several books she illustrated in her lifetime, not on the fifty or so oil paintings she exhibited, but on a private note-book she never intended to publish… Although it could never have been published at the time it was written, this journal became an immediate best-seller seventy years later. Well, I thought I'd really like this, but it was a little dull and there were lots of things the author didn't address. Edith was born in 1871; she and her two younger sisters, who were also very talented, studied at the prestigious Birmingham School of Art, and were encouraged to follow their interests as much as was possible. Alongside darling watercolours of the nature which she observed in her local area, Holden recorded fragments of her favourite poems by the likes of Burns, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Barrett Browning, and personal observations.

I’m a fan of Edith’s artwork and I have a number of items from the franchise but this was a little disappointing.

She was leaning out over a backwater part of the Thames River near Kew Gardens, probably to get chestnut buds to take back to her studio and draw. I had thought to stretch this book out over the full year but ended up going on and finishing it early just because it was so lovely. Here, she wrote and illustrated ‘Nature Notes for 1906’; however, the book was not published under its current title, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, until 1977. So, on one page you have something like, "Edith visited her sister in London and enjoyed the London scene. Edith and her four sisters were instrumental in assisting their father with these communications, which culminated in 1913, when Edith's father published them in his own diary, entitled Messages from the Unseen, only weeks before his own death.

Her father, Arthur, moved to Birmingham after the death of his father; he held ‘Liberal, even Radical’ views, and the directors of the company he worked for, and took over, were ‘known for their socialist ideals’.