Gilbert White Network Publications

As the Gilbert White Network develops, we intend to work on books and other publications. We will also showcase books and articles on Gilbert White and his contexts written by people in the network. Please get in touch if you have a title that you'd like us to feature here.

Our main project now is to curate a collection of essays arising from the June 2025 conference. This has the working title Gilbert White and his Contexts and we are aiming for publication in 2027. We are currently finalising the line-up of contributors. More information will be posted here soon.

Some Recent Publications by Network Members

Cover thumbnail of Jenny Uglow, A Year with Gilbert White

Jenny Uglow, A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer (Faber, 2025)

In A Year with Gilbert White, 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. Find out more...

Cover thumbnail of Edwin Rose, Reading the World: British Practices of Natural History, 1760-1820

Edwin Rose, Reading the World: British Practices of Natural History, 1760-1820 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025)

In Reading the World, Edwin D. Rose positions books, natural history specimens, and people in a close cycle of literary production and consumption. His book reveals new aspects of scientific practice and the specific roles of individuals employed to collect, synthesize, and distribute knowledge - reevaluating Joseph Banks's and Daniel Solander's investigations during James Cook's Endeavour voyage to the Pacific. Uncovering the range of skills involved in knowledge production, Rose expands our understanding of natural history as a cyclical process, from the initial collection and identification of specimens to the formal publication of descriptions to the eventual printing of sources. Find out more...

Cover thumbnail of Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne, eds, <i>Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne, eds, Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700-1840 (Palgrave, 2025)

Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700-1840 is a collection of fourteen original essays by leading literary scholars. It offers important new perspectives into the ways birds generate cultural meaning in a variety of literary and non-literary genres from 1700-1840 as well as throughout a broad range of ecosystems and bioregions. It considers some of the most celebrated figures in eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft,Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and Gilbert White. Find out more...

Cover thumbnail of Anne Secord, ed, The Natural History of Selborne

Anne Secord, ed, The Natural History of Selborne (Oxford World's Classics, 2013)

Anne Secord's edition of The Natural History of Selborne is an attractively illustrated, critically up-to-date edition of Gilbert White's classic work of natural history. It includes 17 contemporary illustrations by Thomas Pennant, a contextualizing introduction, and an appendix of responses to the book from scientists, naturalists, poets, novelists, and writers over two centuries. In addition, useful explanatory notes add historical context, and a select bibliography, chronology of White, biographical index, and general index make this the most comprehensive edition available. Find out more...

Title page of The Natural History of Selborne