The Travels of a Painter of Flowers

Abstract

MOST of the readers of NATURE will know without telling that Marianne North was a world-wide traveller, that she travelled in pursuit of nature, that she was an accomplished and faithful painter of plant and animal life, and that the results of a life's labour were presented by her to the nation, and now cover the walls of a building in Kew Gardens, erected at her expense Most persons, too, who knew her personally—and her acquaintances and friends are as numerous as her travels were wide—will be glad to know something more of her history, and especially something more of her travels, of her impressions of peoples, of places, and, above all, her impressions of the plant and animal life of the many countries she visited and to which she gave her life. All who had the pleasure of knowing her personally will remember her stately presence, her kind face, her charming manner, and her entertaining conversational powers —now relating the difficulties and delights of her experiences in foreign lands, now her appreciation of home comforts and genial society. She wrote as she talked, and she was a fertile letter-writer; and she has written her book in the same style.

Recollections of a Happy Life, being the Autobiography of Marianne North.

Edited by her sister, Mrs. John Addington Symonds. In Two Volumes. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1892.)