Jenny Uglow on A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer

'Uglow's style is supremely elegant and often amusingly bathetic, her research exhaustive but lightly worn.' FINANCIAL TIMES

Jenny Uglow is one of our most enquiring and celebrated biographers. Her books include award-winning biographies on Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and Edward Lear, as well as group studies including The Lunar Men and the panoramic In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815.

Jenny is a retired editorial director of Chatto & Windus, and former Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature. She joins us for A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer, an extraordinary glimpse into the life and mind of the pioneering naturalist.

In 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate, living in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. Fascinated by the fauna, flora and people around him, he kept journals for many years, and, at that time, was halfway to completing his path-breaking The Natural History of Selborne.

No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and sympathy: his spellbinding book has remained in print ever since, treasured by generations of readers.

Jenny Uglow illuminates this quirky, warm-hearted man, 'the father of ecology', by following a single year in his Naturalist's Journal. As his diary jumps from topic to topic, she accompanies Gilbert from frost to summer drought, from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming of harvest.

Fresh, alive and original - and packed with rich colour illustrations - A Year with Gilbert White invites us to see the natural world anew, with astonishment and wonder.

'Uglow makes us feel the life beyond the facts.' GUARDIAN

'Few can match Uglow's skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character.' SUNDAY TIMES