In this contribution the focus is on Frederike van Uildriks as the author of an enormous and varied output of books and articles, literary reviews, comments and fictional stories, many but by large not all of these on subjects relating to ‘nature’, in more than forty papers and periodicals, ranging from general cultural journals, family weeklies, popular science publications and critical political journals. An analysis of her life and work that until recently remained largely unknown reveals that an important aspect of her formative career as a secondary-school teacher and publicist was in her self-education and her taking up seriously the old art of common-placing. From publishing nice citations in a paper she developed into a part time publicist on a wide range of subjects. This changed when in 1891 she entered a common-law marriage. In the home-based isolated life that followed she not only took to heart the physical challenges of the new woman’s life in the form of biking, hiking, canoeing and swimming, she also developed from a polymath-like publicist into a professional author who had to live from her pen. Gradually she became a successful nature study writer who fashioned herself, however, into an independent scholar by propagating the art of self willed ‘hobby study’ as an important supplement to professional, specialised expert knowledge. Due to the combination of such varied repertoires as the new woman, the universal savant and the popular science writer to construct a trustworthy scholarly identity beyond the academy she escaped the attention of the gendered and fragmented frames of many historians.