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"Women pioneers Fiction."
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A Home in the West
This is the first novel published in Iowa. Printed in Dubuque in 1858, it was written to recruit emigrants to Iowa; what makes it unique among emigration literature is the fact that it was directed at women, using the form of a domestic novel loaded with gentle mothers and stalwart fathers, flower-gemmed prairies and vine-draped cottages, and lots of tender words and humble weddings to encourage women to settle in the new state.
Mary Emilia Rockwell tells the story of Walter and Annie Judson, who one desperate March night decide to move to the West in search of a better life. Walter is an exploited, debt-ridden carpenter who knows that \"if we could go to the West, to one of those new States where work is plenty, wages high and land cheap, we could make a more comfortable living, and besides soon have a home of our own.\" Annie has \"all a woman's devotion and self-denial\"; loving and supportive, she takes the path of duty and moves her little family to \"a pleasant little village in Iowa.\" In Newburg, everyone is newly arrived, hard-working, and self-sacrificing, facing difficulties with the certainty of prosperity and independence to come. In spite of dramatic setbacks, Walter prospers, and he and Annie build a \"beautiful and commodious\" house in the growing community of Hastings. The book ends with a return visit to Connecticut, where the Judsons and a series of surprising events persuade Annie's parents to move to Iowa too, and everyone is reunited in their home in the West.
Teacher, administrator, and writer Emilia Rockwell (born about 1835, died about 1915) writes a conventionally sentimental story. However, she actually divorced her first husband, became the administrator of a juvenile reformatory in Milwaukee, and married a second time; she lived in Lansing, Iowa, for only a few years. Her writing is romantic, but she accurately portrays the economic challenges and transformations of this pioneer period and, historically, touches upon the Panic of 1857, the Mormon Handcart Expedition, and Native Americans in Iowa. Sharon Wood's illuminating introduction presents Rockwell's biography and places the novel in its historical and literary contexts, including such events as the Spirit Lake massacre and the Dred Scott decision.A Home in the Westis a satisfying read and an intriguing combination of boosterism and literature
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O Pioneers!
Willa Cather's powerful story about a family of farmers--an instant American classic The first novel in Willa Cather's Prairie Trilogy tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of immigrants eking out a hardscrabble life as farmers in Nebraska at the turn of the nineteenth century.
eBook
Writing the Trail
For a long time, the American West was mainly identified with white masculinity, but as more women’s narratives of westward expansion came to light, scholars revised purely patriarchal interpretations. Writing the Trail continues in this vein by providing a comparative literary analysis of five frontier narratives---Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, Sarah Royce’s A Frontier Lady, Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters, Eliza Farnham’s California, In-doors and Out, and Lydia Spencer Lane’s I Married a Soldier---to explore the ways in which women’s responses to the western environment differed from men’s.Throughout their very different journeys---from an eighteen-year-old bride and self-styled “wandering princess\" on the Santa Fe Trail, to the mining camps of northern California, to garrison life in the Southwest---these women moved out of their traditional positions as objects of masculine culture. Initially disoriented, they soon began the complex process of assimilating to a new environment, changing views of power and authority, and making homes in wilderness conditions.Because critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women’s writings as confirmations of home and stability, they overlook aspects of women’s textualizations of themselves that are dynamic and contingent on movement through space. As the narratives in Writing the Trail illustrate, women’s frontier writings depict geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. By tracing the journeys of Magoffin, Royce, Clappe, Farnham, and Lane, readers are exposed to the subversive strength of travel writing and come to a new understanding of gender roles on the nineteenth-century frontier.
eBook
Wild life
\"Set among lava sinkholes and logging camps at the fringe of the Northwest frontier in the early 1900s, Wild Life charts the life -- both real and imagined -- of the free-thinking, cigar-smoking, trouser-wearing Charlotte Bridger Drummond, who pens popular women's adventure stories. One day, when a little girl gets lost in the woods, Charlotte anxiously joins the search and embarks on an adventure all her own. With great assurance and skill, Molly Gloss quickly transforms what at first seems to be pitch-perfect historical fiction into an extraordinary mystery, as Charlotte herself becomes lost in the dark and tangled woods and falls into the company of an elusive band of mountain giants. (Sasquatch!) Putting a surprising and revitalizing feminist spin on the classic legend of Tarzan and other wild-man sagas\"-- Provided by publisher.
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My Ántonia
From \"undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's greatest American writers:\" The moving story of one woman's struggles and triumphs on the Nebraska frontier ( The Observer ).
In the breathtaking final volume of her acclaimed Prairie Trilogy, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Willa Cather brings to life one of the most remarkable heroines in American literature.
The eldest daughter of Bohemian emigrants, fourteen-year-old Ántonia Shimerda arrives in Black Hawk, Nebraska, blissfully unaware of the poverty and heartbreak that lie in store for her family. But as one calamity after another befalls the Shimerdas, Ántonia finds the strength not merely to survive, but to thrive. Under the watchful eye of Jim Burden, her neighbor and childhood friend, Ántonia blossoms into a woman as beautiful, captivating, and resilient as the Great Plains.
Told in lush and evocative prose, My Ántonia is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature and a stirring tribute to the homesteaders whose pioneer spirit tamed the American West.
\"The thing about Willa Cather's landscape and figures is that not only were they born alive but remain so after six decades.\" — The Guardian
\"No romantic novel ever written in America . . . is half so beautiful as My Ántonia .\" —H. L. Mencken
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