SOURCE: Buell, Lawrence. “Pastoral Ideology.” In The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, pp. 31-52. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Buell discusses the distinct manner in which nineteenth-century women depicted nature.

The feminist critique of wilderness romance should not block us from seeing how pastoral modes have functioned as a means of empowerment for women writers. While researching environmental writing and commentary from Thoreau's day to ours, I was surprised to find a significant degree of interdependence between the “major” male figures and the work and commentary of women writers less well known. Roughly half the nature essays contributed to the Atlantic Monthly during the late nineteenth century, the point when the nature essay became a recognized genre, were by female authors.¹ Among early appraisals of Thoreau, I found, unexpectedly—given the predominant notion of Thoreau...