About Margaret Fountaine
Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine (16 May 1862 – 21 April 1940), was a Victorian lepidopterist (a person interested in butterflies and moths), natural history illustrator, diarist, and traveller who published in The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation. She is also known for her personal diaries, which were edited into two volumes by W.F. Cater for the popular market and published posthumously. Fountaine was an accomplished natural history illustrator and had a great love and knowledge of butterflies, travelling and collecting extensively through Europe, South Africa, India, Tibet, America, Australia and the West Indies, publishing numerous papers on her work. She raised many of the butterflies from eggs or caterpillars, producing specimens of great quality, 22,000 of which are housed at the Norwich Castle Museum and known as the Fountaine-Neimy Collection. Her four sketch books of butterfly life-cycles are held at the Natural History Museum in London. The butterfly genus Fountainea was named in her honour. In Sicily she contacted the leading lepidopterist Enrico Ragusa and her research in Sicily led to her first publication on the subject in The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation in 1897. Fountaine travelled the world, collecting butterflies in sixty countries on six continents over fifty years, and became an expert in tropical butterfly life-cycles.
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