Tina Rowe finds out more about Somerset's Eleanor Glanville, a pioneering naturalist, whose life story is being re-written by author Fiona Mountain

I t is a true tale of passion and prejudice, science and super- stition and stars a West Country heiress charged with insanity because of her love of butterflies.

Three hundred years after her death, Somerset-born Eleanor Glanville is recognised as a pioneering naturalist, and the specimens she collected are among the prized possessions of the Natural History Museum.

Now award-winning novelist Fiona Mountain has taken the extraordinarily dramatic facts of Eleanor's life as the launch pad for a sweeping romantic novel. Lady of the Butterflies will be published next month by Preface, an imprint of Random House.

Eleanor was collecting and studying insects at a time when their lifecycles were still mysterious, and when some people even thought that butterflies were the souls of the dead. Fiona explains: "The 17th century is a wonderful period to write about – a turbulent, savage, vibrant age that provides the most fascinating backdrop for historical fiction.

"The intellectual changes which occurred during the second half of the 17th century have become known as the Scientific Revolution.

"The Royal Society was founded in 1662 and 'natural philosophers' gathered to discussed astronomy, physics, alchemy and mathematics.

"Country mansions were filled with curios and there was a great desire to collect, categorise and catalogue and bring order out of the chaos of the natural world.

"The earliest collectors were members of the Royal Society but still, in the Stuart Age, a butterfly net was a badge of oddness, with male collectors being accused of going bug hunting because they hadn't the spirit to follow the fox.

"Anyone who took an interest in butterflies was the subject of pity and derision and often misunderstood.

"And a woman who dared to forsake domesticity in favour of learning and science and what were considered 'masculine pursuits', was especially prey to ridicule and superstition."

Eleanor, daughter of a Roundhead major, was born Eleanor Goodricke in 1654, at medieval Tickenham Court, near Clevedon.

She was to lead a life far removed from the quiet domesticity expected of her sex and class. In some ways, her life was more like a modern soap opera.

Her first husband died young, leaving her with two children. She then married Richard Glanville, a Lincolnshire landowner, and had two more children. But the marriage soon went disastrously wrong and they parted. Glanville went to live with another woman, and sent Richard, his son by Eleanor, to live inFlanders.

When the boy returned to England as a teenager Eleanor, who was already corresponding with members of the Royal Society, apprenticed him to apothecary James Petiver. It was the sensible act of a caring mother but her estranged husband did not agree. Petiver, a member of the Royal Society, is known today as the father of entomology. He gave many butterflies the names we now know them by, such as Brimstone, Admiral and Tortoiseshell. But Glanville and his mistress wanted the boy in their control and so began what can best be described as a custody battle, in which the boy was forced to leave his studies and live in various places chosen by his father.

Young Richard was later to bemoan the loss of his apprenticeship with such an "ingenious" man. In a letter to his uncle he told how he was "cajoled" to "leave the best of mothers to go with the worst of fathers".

Troubles would pursue Eleanor beyond the grave. Other relations including Forest Ashfield, her son from her first marriage, contested her will, trying to have it set aside on the grounds of lunacy, claiming: "None but those who were deprived of their Senses, would go in Pursuit of Butterflies".

Fiona Mountain believes that for Eleanor, butterflies may also have been a solace from her troubles, their transformation from caterpillars a metaphor for hope and redemption. Eleanor's son by Glanville became a physician, the first of a dynasty of doctors who lived at Wedmore, where they are commemorated in Glanville Road.

Tickenham Court is now owned by Stewart Plant, whose architect mother saved and restored it. Butterflies still thrive in its garden and in the lush meadows of the North Somerset Levels.

And though those superstitious Stuarts were wrong about butterflies being immortal souls, Eleanor is immortalised in the name of the Glanville Fritillary, the beautiful insect which she was the first to capture and describe. She found it in Lincolnshire but today it is mainly restricted to the Isle of Wight.

Like many other species, the Glanville Fritillary is under further threat. Butterfly populations are indicators of climate change, their fate and ours inextricably entwined.

They still have much to tell us and now we know it would be mad not to study them.