Louisa Lane Clarke (; 1812 – 8 November 1883) was a British botanist and travel writer, best known for her

microscopy Microscopy is the technical field of using microscopes to view objects and areas of objects that cannot be seen with the naked eye (objects that are not within the resolution range of the normal eye). There are three well-known branches of micr ...

work on plants.

Biography

Louisa Lane was born in 1812 in the Channel Islands, the eldest daughter of Major-General Ambrose Lane and Elizabeth Lane, ''née'' Le Mesurier. On 14 September 1841, Lane married the Revd. Thomas Clarke ( – 1864), Rector of

Woodeaton Woodeaton or Wood Eaton is a village and civil parish about northeast of Oxford, England. It also has a special needs school called Woodeaton Manor School. Archaeology There was a Romano-Celtic temple north of where the parish church now stand ...

Oxfordshire Oxfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the north west of South East England. It is a mainly rural county, with its largest settlement being the city of Oxford. The county is a centre of research and development, primarily ...

. They then relocated to East Bergholt,

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

. Clarke wrote numerous travel guides. She is best known for her later botanical work popularizing microscopy. Her husband died in 1864 and she relocated to

Guernsey Guernsey (; Guernésiais: ''Guernési''; french: Guernesey) is an island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy that is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown Dependency. It is the second largest of the Channel Islands ...

with her daughter, Theodora, by the following year. Clarke died in L'Hyvreuse, Saint Peter Port,

Selected works

Travel guides

* ''Recollections and Legends of Serk'' * ''Redstone's Guernsey Guide'' * ''The Country Parson's Wife'' * ''The New Parish Church of St. Ann'' (1850) * ''The Island of Alderney''

Scientific works

* ''The Microscope: Being a Popular Description of the Most Instructive and Beautiful Subjects for Exhibition'' was published in successive editions into the 1880s. * ''The Common Seaweeds of the British Coast and Channel Islands; with Some Insight into the Microscopic Beauties of Their Structure and Fructification''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Clarke, Louisa Lane 1812 births 1883 deaths Writers from the Channel Islands People from East Bergholt English botanical writers English botanists Women botanists British women travel writers English travel writers Place of death missing Date of birth missing 19th-century English women writers