In Nature's Name

Barbara T. Gates is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories and Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press. In 2000, she was awarded the Founders' Distinguished Senior Scholar Award by the American Association of University Women.

"The hibernating trance is intirely [sic] under the animal's own control, and only in a secondary degree dependant [sic] on the weather.... [The hedgehog] closes its eyes & holds its breath, occasionally it catches a breath in spite of itself with a sobbing gasp. The process looks difficult and highly uncomfortable; and the animal is very cross if interrupted...." - Beatrix Potter, from "Hedgehogs" "In Nature's Name, Barbara Gates's splendid new anthology, is packed with treasures and discoveries. Learned, lavishly illustrated and meticulously annotated, the book is bound to appeal to a range of readers, from feminist scholars to historians of science, from students of Romanticism, Victorianism and modernism to lovers of what one of the nineteenth-century authors represented here described as that 'charming beautifier Dame Nature.' " - Sandra M. Gilbert, coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women