Anne LaBastille

Few memoirs are as aptly titled as Anne LaBastille’s Woodswoman.

Published in 1976, the book is the first in a four-volume autobiographical series written by LaBastille, an ecologist, environmentalist, recluse, author, and professor, among many other titles. Could just as easily add woodworker, builder, philosopher, guide, and teacher to that list. LaBastille’s books chronicle her life living alone—well, not entirely alone, as she was never far from her beloved German shepherds—in a log cabin she’d built herself in the Adirondacks. A female Henry David Thoreau. She modeled her cabin after Thoreau’s Walden Pond cottage, as a matter of fact.

Woodswoman was perfectly timed upon its release to capture the energy of two cultural waves sweeping the nation, feminism and the environmental movement. That same year, the United Nations had declared 1975 the International Women’s Year, and Time magazine’s Person of the Year (still called Man of the Year at the time) went to “American Women.”

At the same time, Congress had spent the first half of the