Woman, Watching

I loved this book because it tells the amazing and deeply researched story of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a famed amateur ornithologist.

Born into the Swedish gentry at the end of the nineteenth century, she trained as a nurse in the First World War before meeting her future husband, a Russian aristocrat. After he was killed by the Bolsheviks, she emigrated to Canada, where she joined the Canadian Red Cross and settled in northern Ontario.

Here, she worked in Red Cross outposts and became the nurse-in-charge of the Dionne Quintuplets. Tiring of the media frenzy around them, she retreated to… show more.

Nothing is more delightful than reading about improbable lives. In her biography of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, Merilyn Simonds writes about a woman whose life could not be predicted.

She was born in Sweden into a wealthy aristocratic family. Trained as a nurse, when she was twenty-three, she fell in love with a White Russian POW in a Swedish rehab camp and followed him back to his country in 1918. Captured by the Bolsheviks, the couple were separated. Louise waited 4 years in Moscow before accepting that he’d been executed.

She moved to the isolation of Northern Ontario and… show more.