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| Margaret Fountaine linocut, 11" x14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023 |
Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine (1862-1940)'s posthumous books featured the somewhat salacious bits of her diaries of her "wild and fearless life," but she was a also trailblazing Victorian lepidopterist, who published in many papers in The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variations, and was an expert on tropical butterflies, discovering, documenting, breeding and gathering specimen in 60 countries on 6 continents, a talented scientific illustrator, who gathered a collection of 22,000 (bequeathed to the Norwich Castle Museum). She became the only female fellow in the Royal Entomological Society in 1898. She gave scientific lectures internationality on things like "the sagacity of caterpillars." She was the most famous woman lepidopterist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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| Margaret Fountaine wore many hats |
The eldest daughter of seven children born to a family of modest means of clergyman John Fountaine
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| Septimus Hewson, swindler & object of her affection |
and his wife (also a clergyman's daughter) Mary Isabella Lee, Margaret was born in Norwich. The family moved to Eaton Grange, Norwich, when her father died. The next year, at 15, Margaret began keeping a diary, a habit she kept up until her death in 1940. Teenage Margaret spent her time in nature, or gossiping with siblings about her crushes. She had already developed her interest in natural history, and her habit of falling for men she saw but didn't know... and recording her anguished feelings in her diary. She spent seven years yearning after an Irish chorister, Septimus Hewson, at her local church, pretending she was painting interior scenes of the church as an excuse to essentially stalk him. She wrote angrily in her diary if she spotted him talking to other women, though she herself had never dared speak to him. Sadly for Margaret, Septimus was a drunk and a swindler who thrown out of Norwich in disgrace. So Margaret claimed she was visiting some respectable ladies in Dublin, but snuck away to follow Septimus to Limerick and profess her love. He apparently reciprocated and she considered herself engaged. She returned home and wrote to him of her joy that her years secretly pinning after him would end with their marriage. After weeks of silence his own relatives wrote to her that she would be best to forget him; he had betrayed everyone he knew and squandered all his money on booze. She found herself nearing 30, a spinster by Victorian standards, with no prospects and no plan. But the death of a wealthy uncle when she was 27 had giving her and her sister the freedom to make choices that few of her contemporaries could enjoy.
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| Margaret Fountaine with bicycle and fabulous hat |
Her first move was to leave, and escape her painful memories of unrequited love. So she headed to the continent with her sister, touring France and Switzerland by bicycle, where she found a way to dull her pain by encouraging a series of men's affections and then scorning them She wrote, "it was the pleasure of inflicting that pain that my soul was craving for. I could do it - I had the power. I had learnt it now at last." She became more serious in her butterfly collecting, using Latin rather than common names. She settled in Milan, encouraged by a teacher who told her she could have a career in opera. The workload, training, lifestyle and uncertainty of success were not for her but she kept up her studies until 1895 when she met Henry John Elwes, Fellow of the Royal Society, vice-president of the Horticultural Society and a passionate butterfly collector, at his UK estate. Butterfly collecting was not uncommon for Victorian ladies, but Margaret did not do things by half-measures. Margaret realized this could be her life's purpose. Unlike hobbyists Margaret sought out not just to gather, but to document and breed species and to travel anywhere, no matter how inhospitable, to do so, tracking elusive species through European mountains, African deserts, South American jungles, Indian plains, Australia and islands of the South Pacific.
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| Margaret and Kalil, around 1912 |
Much of this work, for better or worse, was done in partnership with a dragoman (a sort of local fixer/interpreter and guide) Khalil Neimy, 15 years her junior, which
we know because she noted his help (when many peers did not bother) whom she met in Damascus. Though secretly married, he declared his love for her, and they spent many years of a tumultuous relationship together, travelling the world and collecting butterflies, and, in while South America, she developed means of rearing butterflies. She shared her knowledge freely with fellow collectors and entomologists, and though not dedicated to writing up her scientific results, her reputation was such that she was invited to join the prestigious Linnean Society in 1912.
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| Margaret with her butterfly net |
References
Dale DeBakcsy, Love and Butterflies The Adventures of Victorian Lepidopterist Margaret Fountaine, Women You Should Know, January 15, 2020
David Waterhouse, A Love of Butterflies - The Fountaine-Neimy Collection, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Museum, July 2, 2021
Florien Duijsens, Podcast # 27: Margaret Fountaine, Dead Ladies Show, November 19, 2019
The captivating life of a leading lepidopterist, KL Magazine, accessed March, 2023
Margaret Fountaine, Norfolk Women in History, accessed March, 2023
Margaret Fountaine, Wikipedia, accessed March, 2023
