It may have been something about the Pennsylvania mountains that brought Linda Lear and Rachel Carson to each other. They both grew up in Pennsylvania, but the two women never met. They never spoke. Indeed, Lear was in high school when Carson's major work, Silent Spring, was published in 1962. An only child, Lear remembers discussing it with her mother. She couldn't have known it at the time, but her life already had overlapped cosmically with Carson's in those mountains.

Later, as an adult, Lear, whose own major work, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, was released this month, would discover other conjunctions in their lives. While teaching environmental history at George Washington University, Lear always came up short when she tried to find texts on Carson's life.

"Undergraduates find Silent Spring very hard going," Lear said last week while talking about her book informally at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. "It's very dense and needs a historical context. I decided there was a real need for a classroom biography."

Having already written a biography on Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior under Franklin Roosevelt, Lear was familiar with the particular work of creating a biography, and diligently lit into research and interviews. That was when destiny tapped her on the shoulder with quirky, but undeniable, coincidences. For instance, Lear's grandmother knew Carson's mother from a women's church group. Lear's high school biology teacher was Carson's college friend. Both Lear and Carson went to Washington, D.C., as single women, worked for the government, lived in the suburbs. Most significantly, both had an interest in environmental issues and writing.

"By the time I had discovered all that, I had given up on the idea of writing a little classroom textbook and wanted to write a big book," said Lear, who still teaches at GWU and also is a research collaborator in the Office of Smithsonian Institution Archive. "Like Rachel, I feel the subject picks you, and I really felt this was a subject I was supposed to do."

In short, Lear had one of those unexplainably suitable projects at her fingertips. She began working intensively in the late 1980s. There were hurdles to jump with family members in charge of Carson's estate, and many, many phone calls and visits to be made to Carson's friends, family and associates who were still alive. (Carson had struggled with breast cancer and died of a heart attack at age 56 in 1964.)

And, of course, there was Maine. In June 1946, Carson treated herself and her mother, who was by her side for much of her life, to a vacation in Maine. They packed up the two cats and made the long drive north to Boothbay Harbor, where Carson wanted to study a fish hatchery. "Unwittingly, Carson had found a place to which she gave her heart, one that was to have a lasting influence on both her life and her writing," Lear explains in the biography. "Rachel Carson was not the first or the last writer to fall in love with the raw beauty of Maine's rocky coasts and deep green forests of pine and spruce, but few others have been so aware of the nuances of land and sea, or have written of their textures with such artistry."

When her monthlong stay ended, Carson knew she had found a spiritual home for the combination of poet and naturalist in her. "At least I know now that my greatest ambition is to be able to buy a place here and then manage to spend a great deal of time in it -- summers at least!" Carson wrote to a friend. Eventually, Carson did buy a cottage on Southport Island.

Her closest friend there, and perhaps the closest friend of her life, was Dorothy Freeman, who owned a home on Southport with her husband, Stanley. Their son, Stanley Freeman of Orono, helped Lear verify facts about Carson's life for the biography. His daughter, Martha Freeman, edited the 1995 book Always, Rachel, a collection of the letters exchanged between Carson and Dorothy Freeman.

The younger Stanley Freeman didn't know Carson well, but he described the relationship between his mother and Carson as absolutely significant to both women's lives. Although he hasn't read Lear's biography thoroughly yet, he already has learned more about Carson's life in a quick scan than he was able to glean from conversations with his mother and the many letters he has read.

"Linda was and is one of the many people researching Rachel over the years," said Freeman, vice president of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra and a retired educator at the University of Maine. "I'm proud to have my mother appear as a significant part of the Rachel Carson story."

Dorothy Freeman figures prominently in the biography, and the emotionally intimate relationship between her and Carson is sure to stir up questions about the nature of their liaison. Carson had close relationships with women throughout her life and never spoke of falling in love with a man. But Lear denounces any other suggestions, and believes that Carson's relationship with Dorothy Freeman provided Carson with an unprecedented tenderness in its friendship.

"Everything I know there is laid out," said Lear. "Marriage offered Carson nothing. She already had her own family and more than enough responsibility. She was the breadwinner. She had a domestic person in her mother. And she didn't want to have children. Rachel wanted to be left alone. Her sense of mission was so overwhelming. This was a woman who was supposed to do something, and she did it."

Dorothy Freeman, in her constancy and support, made her own contribution to Carson's work.

"Dorothy was the most significant relationship Carson had -- emotionally and spiritually," said Lear. "Dorothy Freeman was absolutely the love of her life. As a historian, I won't make any claim that I don't know. I feel there was intensity and romance, but haven't you felt that way about a close friend? I felt people -- especially women who have had these types of close friendships -- would understand that in the book."

Toward the end of her life, Carson had two other close friends, both of whom appear in Lear's book. Jean Davis, Carson's administrative assistant during the publication of Silent Spring, lives in Chevy Chase, Md., and is now reading Lear's book.

Indeed, at her most vocal, Carson alerted the nation to the dangers of pesticides, and Silent Spring resulted in the banning of DDT. As an environmental whistle-blower, she set a personal and professional standard that would be used again and again by activists decrying the misuse of chemicals in agribusiness.

That spirit of quiet determination caught the heart and mind of Duncan Howlett, a Unitarian-Universalist minister who lived in Washington in the 1960s, and another character in Carson's biography. Already a fan of Carson's The Sea Around Us, Howlett immediately accepted an invitation to attend a book party for Carson after Silent Spring arrived on bookshelves. A kinship formed and, as Lear points out in her book, Howlett saw Carson as a "prophet of her time, like Jeremiah, motivated by her love of the natural world, trying to persuade reasonable people how to behave." Howlett had intended to deliver the funeral oration for his friend at her death, but family wishes superseded both Carson's and those of her supporters, and a large funeral was held.

"The same thing that was eating her has been eating at me all my life," said Howlett, who lives in Lovell. About Lear's book, he added: "The attitude toward Rachel and the meaning of her life, the kind of person she was and the quiet courage she had, [Lear] got it all right."

The industries against which Carson fought saw her as anathema, said Howlett, and Lear's book accurately exposes the mistreatment Carson experienced not only as a concerned scientist but as a woman.

Before Lear's work, accounts of Carson's life had tended to sentimentalize her -- as if a woman working in the 1940s, '50s and '60s had to have the edges of her strong intellectual and social power mollified by niceties. And Lear will be the first one to point out that Carson loved to have her nails polished, went to the beauty parlor once a week and emphasized her beautiful legs by wearing comely shoes. But she wanted to demythologize Carson, too.

"I wanted to make her as unremote as possible," said Lear. "I wanted people to get a sense that believing singularly in one thing can make a difference, that the individual can make a difference in the world still. There's nothing wrong with listening to your own drummer. She's a role model for all of us who would like to understand more about the natural world and are put off by academia. This is a woman who shows us you don't necessarily have to be the most brilliant creative mind to make a difference in science. She pulled together information, and that alone was important. She dared to take on the establishment and didn't cower. You didn't rattle Rachel Carson."

During her lifetime, Carson was a private person, and many were not aware of her impoverished upbringing and family struggles. Lear's book, which is more than 600 pages long, including extensive notes and an index, outlines that life in unembellished and nonjudgmental detail. Carson may have been private, but Lear feels the biography would meet with her subject's approval.

"She wrote for the public," said Lear. "Anyone who writes for the public and changes the world knows she's a public figure. I don't think she would be unhappy with this book. She taught us about our place in the universe. Her anger was that human beings had overstepped their place. She teaches us the lesson of ecology, that everything is connected to everything else, and we are only a small part of the action."

Carson, of course, was no small part of the action in her own lifetime. Fatefully, she is no small part of the action in Lear's life, either.