Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical—and too dangerous for women.
Natural Magic intertwines the stories of these two luminary nineteenth-century minds whose thought and writings captured the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time strove to preserve the magic of nature. Just as Darwin’s work was informed by his roots in natural philosophy and his belief in the interconnectedness of all life, Dickinson’s poetry was shaped by her education in botany, astronomy, and chemistry, and by her fascination with the enchanting possibilities of Darwinian science. Casting their two very different careers in an entirely fresh light, Renée Bergland brings to life a time when ideas about science were rapidly evolving, reshaped by poets, scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike. She paints a colorful portrait of a remarkable century that transformed how we see the natural world.
Illuminating and insightful, Natural Magic explores how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim their shared sense of ecological wonder.
Awards and Recognition
- A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year
"Although Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson are not known to have ever crossed paths, this study finds meaning in their shared enchantment with the natural world. . . . Bergland links their thinking to an earlier tradition of ‘natural’ (as opposed to supernatural) magic, which emphasized the interconnectedness of life and valued emotion as a form of understanding."—New Yorker
"Brilliant. . . . A fascinating and elegantly told story about science and religion and art."—Craig Fehrman, Boston Globe
"In her deeply researched and crisply accessible book, Bergland explores the upbringing, education, and output of these two icons—a naturalist who loved poetry and a poet trained in natural history—to illuminate how they mingled literature and science, philosophy and theology."—Marissa Grunes, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Natural Magic is not an influence study. Darwin never even knew that Dickinson existed, and she mentioned Darwin only in passing. But Ms. Bergland hopes that studying their lives side by side—which she does with great care and deep knowledge—will shed new light on both. . . . Although Ms. Bergland doesn’t explicitly say so, her clever pairing of Darwin and Dickinson strongly suggests that the real wonder we feel when looking at a bird in flight or an overgrown riverbank or fossil tracks left by some lumbering, long-gone creature comes from realizing how little our minds are equipped to understand nature’s complexity"—Christoph Irmscher, Wall Street Journal
"Taking the form of a joint biography, Natural Magic alternates between Darwin and Dickinson. . . . While Bergland offers comprehensive portraits, building on the extensive work of other biographers and scholars, the book’s own magic shines in the dialogue created between its subjects’ bodies of work."—Kaitlin Mondello, Science
"In this adventurous study, literature professor Bergland pairs Dickinson and Darwin to chart a profound transitional stage in Western intellectual history: a shift toward the separation of scientific and artistic perspectives. . . . An illuminating juxtaposition of two 19th-century trailblazers and their relevance to scientific history."—Kirkus Reviews
"In Natural Magic, [Bergland] teases out significant strands connecting the poet of Amherst with the English naturalist, beyond the historical overlap of their lives. . . . Setting Dickinson beside Darwin amplifies our sense of these two thinkers and the capaciousness of vision that they shared. It amplifies, particularly, Dickinson’s connectedness to the intellectual concerns and conversations of her era."—Sally Thomas, National Review
"The naturalist Charles Darwin and the poet Emily Dickinson would seem to be unlikely bedfellows. . .but in her fascinating and timely book Renée Bergland draws them into a web of connections. . . .Natural Magic is an immensely rich and rewarding study of two great human exemplars, people whom the naturalist John Herschel described as those who "walk in the midst of wonders"."—John Banville, Irish Times
"[Natural Magic] is well researched, clearly written, and—as Bergland notes several times—extremely relevant for a 21st century mired in environmental problems."—Choice
"Dickinson and Darwin have separately been the subject of numerous biographies and interpretive essays. What Bergland adds is a thoughtful and highly readable evocation of nature's place in nineteenth-century discourse and the growing separation between literature seen as emotional and idiosyncratic and professional science regarded as coldly logical and fact-based. Dickinson and Darwin, Bergland suggests, bridge this divide, both firmly committed to the close examination of nature, but enchanted by the wondrous complexity of it all. For both, the universe retained an element of magic."—Laurence A. Marschall, Natural History
"Vivid and hugely well-informed."—David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer
“In this innovative study, Renée Bergland juxtaposes two passionate observers of the natural world to explore the poetry in Darwin and the science in Dickinson. Though they were separated by an ocean—at once real and metaphorical—she nevertheless finds deep unities in their understanding of the changing earth and its organisms. To them the world appeared to be alive with relationships—living relationships that provide the magic of her title.”—Janet Browne, author of Charles Darwin: A Biography
“If, like me, you would invite Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin to share an imagined soirée, fantasize no more. Renée Bergland brings together their life stories and their complementary artistic and intellectual pursuits in her well-researched, beautifully written book. It is a robust conversation, and pure enchantment.”—Marta McDowell, author of Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life
“A riveting narrative that crisscrosses the Atlantic, Natural Magic tells a story of two figures driven by their wonder at the intricate delicacies of the natural world. It shows Dickinson and Darwin enthralled by surprising proximities that the study of nature lays bare. At its heart, Natural Magic reillumines a time in which scientific thinking is still linked to mystery and a marvelous connectedness.”—Anna Henchman, author of The Starry Sky Within
