The Wild Heart

Animals watched at close quarters and written up without a moral: a sea-gull, a quail, a bear, a seal that came back. Emma-Lindsay Squier was a Californian journalist who spent her time in the field rather than the library, and said herself the book had no literary style. She was wrong about that, and right that everything in it was observed. Fifty-nine plates after Winslow Homer and George Inness, from forest edges and autumn wood-gathering to Florida and Bahamas palms, keep the wild places of these stories in view.