Country Diary of An Edwardian Lady

The Country Diary of An Edwardian Lady, is an English Midlands television series from 1984, that I've long wanted to see. Lo! and behold! it was just sitting there on the shelves of my local NYPL branch this week. Nope, Netflix doesn't have it.

Due to when the series was made, the color values haven't held up for every scene in the 12 (short) episodes -- one for every month.  This is sad because so many of the scenes were made on the Warwickshire wildlife reserves in the West Midlands. Farming, flowers, birds, and small rodents including bunnies are the focus (rabbits were not reclassified from rodentia to lagomorpha until 1912).

Edith Blackwell Holden

The series is based on Edith Holden's posthumously published book, Nature Diary of 1906. This in turn is based on on her Nature Notes for 1906, which she made as a teaching aid during her short career as a teacher at the Solihull School for Girls.

Juncos

She included fair copies of relevant poetry and other literary extracts.  So one can see why this manuscript, when published, became a perfect gift book, one of those 'Treasuries' and 'Keepsakes' that used to be a perennial on the lists of the publishing industry from the Victorian era* even into the 1960's.

Edith Blackwell Holden was a part-time teacher and a nature artist; she illustrated children's books and other publications.**  As well, her paintings were exhibited in the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and the Royal Academy of Arts. She was much influenced, as were her mother and sisters, by the Arts and Crafts Movement***  of the time.  Her family were members of the Unitarian Church, and, somewhat later, became Spirtualists. The family held seances as a matter-of course; after her death, they spoke frequently with Emma, their mother and wife. This is part of the series, as are sibling rivalry, unsuccessful marriages, falling fortunes of the family business and other changes that challenge the comfortable prosperous security of this family. After Holden's own marriage, the couple's friends included such figures as George Frampton, he who sculpted the figure of Peter Pan in Kensington Park -- which I of course photographed when there last autumn.

However, Edith Holden's fame, such as it is, arrived long after her death, with the 1977 publication of The Country Diary of An Edwardian Lady. I have a copy, found in one of the many second hand and remainder book stores that used to be in Manhattan, the first full year I lived here, during my lunch hour rummages.

Every sort of nostalgia is part of Country Diary's charm. But nostalgic as it might be for a world that the artist perhaps saw as already passing, it is authentic.  With so much reading in slavery and the trade, something gentler, of people who possess a social conscience – they were socialists of a sort.  They cared about the laboring classes and the poor. One of Edith's sisters married what we'd call today an activist, and they made it their lives' work to help better the conditions of the poor. These people, able --  privileged, as they are well aware -- to also love art and nature, is very welcome to a sore heart.**** 

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* See that famous scene between sophisticated, urbane Dr. Lydgate and Rosamond in Middlemarch, in which Lydgate makes fun of a Keepsake Annual to the resentment of one of Rosmond's local suitors. From Chapter 27:

Mr. Ned smiled nervously, while Lydgate, drawing the "Keepsake" towards him and opening it, gave a short scornful laugh and tossed up his chill, as if in wonderment at human folly.
"What are you laughing at so profanely?" said Rosamond, with bland neutrality.
"I wonder which would turn out to be the silliest—the engravings or the writing here," said Lydgate, in his most convinced tone, while he turned over the pages quickly, seeming to see all through the book in no time, and showing his large white hands to much advantage, as Rosamond thought. "Do look at this bridegroom coming out of church: did you ever see such a 'sugared invention'—as the Elizabethans used to say? Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking? Yet I will answer for it the story makes him one of the first gentlemen in the land."
"You are so severe, I am frightened at you," said Rosamond, keeping her amusement duly moderate. Poor young Plymdale had lingered with admiration over this very engraving, and his spirit was stirred.
"There are a great many celebrated people writing in the 'Keepsake,' at all events," he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid. "This is the first time I have heard it called silly."
"I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth," said Rosamond, looking at Lydgate with a smile. "I suspect you know nothing about Lady Blessington and L. E. L." Rosamond herself was not without relish for these writers, but she did not readily commit herself by admiration, and was alive to the slightest hint that anything was not, according to Lydgate, in the very highest taste.
"But Sir Walter Scott—I suppose Mr. Lydgate knows him," said young Plymdale, a little cheered by this advantage.
"Oh, I read no literature now," said Lydgate, shutting the book, and pushing it away. "I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it will last me all my life. I used to know Scott's poems by heart."
"I should like to know when you left off," said Rosamond, "because then I might be sure that I knew something which you did not know."
"Mr. Lydgate would say that was not worth knowing," said Mr. Ned, purposely caustic.
"On the contrary," said Lydgate, showing no smart; but smiling with exasperating confidence at Rosamond. "It would be worth knowing by the fact that Miss Vincy could tell it me."
Young Plymdale soon went to look at the whist-playing, thinking that Lydgate was one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it had ever been his ill-fortune to meet.

** While watching this series, filled with poetry recited in a woman's voice, for this American, Edna St. Vincent Millay's paeons to nature come constantly to mind, particularly her first one, which in 1912 made her fame, Renascence,  the same era as Holden made her Country Notes. But Holden is more fascinated by  the realities of fur, feathers and stamens than the lyrically passionate trancendentalist Millay. Beatrix Potter could almost be Holden's sister, with Peter Rabbit published in 1901. Like Holden, Potter worked from nature, despite the whimsy that infuses her still famous children's books. As did Kenneth Grahame it seems, for his tales of Toad Hall that make up Wind in the Willows (1908), though his most famous illustrator, E. H. Shepard isn't as painstaking in the natural detail of the animals as Holden and Potter, as we certainly see in his Winnie the Pooh illustrations.

*** One feels that beyond E.S. Nesbit, Edith Holden is one of the many figures upon whom A.S. Byatt drew in the writing of her  2009 The Children's Book.

**** Yet,  I only research, read, account and write of, in an organized manner, these horrors, which many millions for two and a half centuries lived and died.