LOUDON, Jane. The Lady’s Country Companion; or, how to enjoy a country life rationally. With an engraving on steel, and illustrations on wood. Second edition, improved and enlarged. xi, [1], 436, 32pp adverts., engraved frontispiece and 19 text illustrations. A good copy in original gilt lettered dark green cloth. Slight fading to the spine, and some foxing to the plate. 8vo. Longmans. 1846. ~ “Jane Loudon, (1807-1858) turned to writing as a career when, in 1824, the death of her father Thomas Webb, a Birmingham businessman, forced her to earn a living at the age of seventeen. In her first major work, The Mummy: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), Loudon created a science-fiction novel that contained elements of the Gothic tradition while presenting speculations about the technology of the future and reflections on the political instability of her time. John Claudius Loudon, a well-known landscape gardener, town planner, and writer, was so taken with the book that he arranged to meet the anonymous author. Although there was a twenty-four year difference between the two, they married... several months after their first meeting. Jane moved into her husband’s villa residence in Porchester Terrace, Bayswater... where John had set up a magnificent garden. By this time John Loudon’s right arm had been amputated, and Jane became his amanuensis, helping him with his gardening and writing projects. Embarassed that she knew so little about gardening or botany, Jane undertook a private study of the subjects and attended John Lindley’s lectures. Her career as a pupularizer did not begin until the 1840's, when the cost of the illustrations in her husband’s Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838) saddled them with a crippling debt of £10,000. When John died in 1843, he left Jane in severe financial straits. Writing had become a financial necessity for [her] and... she churned our eight botany and gardening books after 1840.” ref: Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. 2009.