In the quiet countryside of early 20th-century England, Eleanor Dovington lives a life of silence, solitude, and wings. A butterfly collector by profession but a poet at heart, Eleanor wanders the Cambridgeshire meadows with a net in her hand and a notebook under her arm. Where others see insects, Eleanor sees memory, color, and breath—fragments of beauty fleeting and impermanent, yet too precious to be forgotten.

Trained by her father, a gentle and dreamy naturalist, Eleanor grows into a woman content with her independence and her calling. Her small cottage is filled with glass cases, pressed petals, and handwritten field notes, all carefully labeled and meticulously preserved. But as the modern world shifts toward laboratories, microscopes, and the cold logic of genetics, Eleanor's career begins to fade, as do the creatures she once captured.

Customers stop writing. Museums turn to new sciences. Her livelihood disappears.

Yet, faced with her insignificance, Eleanor doesn't despair. Instead, she evolves. She begins to see her butterflies not as trophies, but as witnesses. She lets go of her net. She opens her hands. She finds that in releasing what she's been holding so tightly, something new—perhaps more enduring—is lifted into the air.

"A Record of Wing and Wind" is a poetic, atmospheric novel about loss, legacy, and the revolution of quiet observation. Inspired by forgotten naturalists and the poetics of observation, it's a meditation on what it means to love something fleeting—and how memory, like wings, can leave a mark without leaving a trace.