Abstract
The South African botanist Margaret Rutherford Levyns (1890-1975) documented her life in numerous private diaries and journals that she never published during her own lifetime. Despite these writings, there are no histories that prominently feature Levyns or her immense contributions to South African science and her pioneering role as a woman academic. Her life, in a sense, remains 'unrecovered' and unused by the historical community. This essay examines Levyns' important and as yet untold contribution to twentieth-century South African history, botany, and environmental philosophy. I argue that an examination of Levyns' life-writing and scientific publications reveals that she maintained historically unique and important views on invasive species and convergent evolution that have been overlooked by historians and scientists. A broader study of her ideas provides us with a more complete understahding of her life, and raises important questions about the management of plants today. This essay demonstrates that the questions Levyns grappled with and her conclusions- though applicable to many of the scientific and environmental issues we face today- had different implications during her lifetime than in ours. Recovering Levyns' life and ideas not only provides us with a more accurate conception of what she thought, but how those ideas can be understood and applied to the present.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | International Life Writing: Memory and Identity in Global Context |
| Editors | Paul Longley Arthur |
| Place of Publication | U.S.A. |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Pages | 51-66 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780415522540 |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |