In her 1860 book Lichen Tufts, from the Alleghanies, Elizabeth C. Wright weaves together environmental philosophy, lyrical nature writing, and social consciousness. A graduate of Alfred University, Wright was an activist for women's rights, temperance, and the abolition of slavery. She was a teacher, a botanist, and, later in life, a Kansas homesteader. In Lichen Tufts, Wright urged her readers to cultivate an intimate knowledge of the natural world, reflecting her Transcendentalist belief that an immersive relationship with nature benefits the individual as well as society as a whole. Composed of four essays and forty poems, Lichen Tufts reveals wisdom and beauty in an early example of eco-feminism that highlights the natural world as antidote to society's restrictive gender codes, one that is still relevant today. SUNY Press brings Lichen Tufts, from the Alleghanies to life for modern audiences, with a recovery edition featuring the 1860 book in its entirety. An Introduction by Emily E. VanDette places the book and its author in the context of nineteenth-century social reform campaigns throughout the Burned Over District of western New York. An Afterword written by Laurie Lounsberry Meehan highlights the history of Alfred University and the cohort that influenced Wright's environmental and social reform activism.

Excerpt from Lichen Tufts: From the Alleghanies We were tired and wanted a holiday, so we went off into the woods, out of the way of finery and etiquette, and conventional rubbish, where we should escape from fashionable twaddle, gossips, and flirts - from humbugs and household botheration, and be free to rest and refresh ourselves at leisure. Such an elimination of the ordinary burden of life's occupations would not only leave us free, but make us rich with an unheard of wealth of hours, per diem, at our own disposal. So running the gauntlet of all manner of croaking prophecies about colds and rheumatisms, and spiders crawling into our ears, and caterpillars creeping in at our mouths, and of all manner of shocked proprieties wagging dissenting heads at us, and a prospective storm of "I told you so's!" to hail our disappointed and untimely return, we packed up our bed and board in the narrowest possible compass, and went off, like overgrown children, to play in the woods. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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The first chronological presentation of U.S. nature writing by key women authors of the last two centuries.