Lucy audubon biography facts

Lucy Bakewell Audubon was a British-born educator and philanthropist.
In suppport of John James Audubon's artistic talents, she became a teacher and even founded a school at a time when women rarely earned wages.
Lucy Audubon's self-sacrificing, provident nature generated the funds Audubon needed to travel to England and Scotland in 1826.

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Book Review: Audubon’s Sparrow

Audubon’s Sparrow
A Biography-in-Poems
by Juditha Dowd
Rose Metal Press, 2020

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk

What a wonderful book. Juditha Dowd has created a biography of Lucy Bakewell Audubon, a person in her own right but also the wife of John James Audubon, the artist so famous for his Birds of America. The “sparrow” of the title is a kind of nickname for Lucy herself as well as a reference to a particular engraving of a (male) swamp sparrow, attributed to Lucy; the black and white illustration provided in Audubon’s Sparrow shows the label, “Drawn from Nature by Lucy Audubon,” suggesting she drew it herself.

Snippets of information from various sources are collaged in among the poems, and resemble poems, adding to the intricacy of the book’s structure and content. Notes, a chart, a timeline, a preface, and an afterword add to the rich reading experience. The poems take various forms, including letters and diary entries. Indeed, Rose Metal Press specializes in hybrid forms, and has created the perfect cover for this one, designed by Hea

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Audubon III

Welcome back to several ways of looking at John James Audubon.

Lucy Bakewell was born in Burton-upon-Trent, Straffordshire, England, on January 18, 1787. Seventeen years later, by then translated to Pennsylvania with her family, she met her neighbor John James Audubon. They were married for 43 years beginning in 1808. Then she survived him by 23 years. Their two boys (two daughters died in infancy) also predeceased her: Victor Gifford at 51 in 1860 and John Woodhouse at 49 in 1862. (In the pages of Rhodes’s Audubon bio, Lucy is often ill, but she clearly had a sturdy constitution.)

Whilst in England, the Bakewell family physician was Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). What a marvelous coincidence! Darwin was a Midlands polymath: doctor, abolitionist, inventor, poet, translator of Linnaeus, member of Birmingham’s Lunar Society (they met on nights of the full moon), and grandfather of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), as well as of (hiss, hiss!) eugenicist Francis Galton (1822-1911). Erasmus was a proto-evolutionary thinker, sure that all life was related. For although

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Unique role for artist-naturalist's wife; Lucy Audubon, by Carolyn Delatte. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 248 pp. $15.95.

When you look at a portfolio edition of John James Audubon's spectacular drawings from nature, little do you realize the lifetime of effort and sacrifice it required.

You begin to understand when you read this engaging, well-documented biography of Lucy Bakewell Audubon (1788-1874). Born in England to a well-to-do family, Lucy was surrounded by amenities. After the family moved to Pennsylvania , Lucy met and married a fun-loving and eccentric young Frenchman, John James Audubon, even though her parents were divided in their approval.

The West beckoned, and the adventurous young Audubon formed a partnership with a fellow Frenchman to start a series of stores along the frontier, in Louisville, then down the Ohio River in Henderson, and finally in a French outpost named Ste. Genevieve. Despite her genteel upbringing, Lucy adjusted well to the rowdiness and toughness of frontier life. In fact, her first child was born