MARGARET FOUNTAINE travelled the world between 1891 and 1940 collecting butterflies. While she managed her own affairs in what was a man’s world, she remained trapped, like her specimens, in the net of Victorian rules and assumptions she was born into as the daughter of an English vicar. Based on Fountaine’s diaries, Natascha Scott-Stokes’s biography reflects those times: it is a portrait of a strong, proud but inhibited woman. Sadly, the dozen or so pages on her entomological work feature as an all-too-brief distraction.
Wild and Fearless
Peter Owen
