Dear Mrs. Lindbergh: A Novel - Softcover

Hughes, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393326225 ISBN 13: 9780393326222

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004

Synopsis

"A compassionate exploration of a woman's life―between motherhood and dreaming, living the everyday and taking flight."―Jane Mendelsohn, author of I Was Amelia Earhart

When two elderly Iowans, Ruth and Henry Gutterson, disappear mysteriously on their way home from Thanksgiving, their adult children find a crate of Ruth's letters written to Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In the letters the children read of the origins of their parents' passion: how they first met in 1924 when Henry crashed his Air Mail plane into Ruth's family's cornfield; how Ruth flew alongside Henry as his navigator; about Ruth's passion for flying; and how the birth of her children kept her on the ground.

About this title

About the Author

Kathleen Hughes lives in Bristol, Rhode Island. She attended Yale University and earned her masters in fiction at the University of Iowa Writer's workshop. This is her first novel.

From Publishers Weekly

A passion for flight in the exhilarating early days of air travel and the deep demands of home and family form the background of this bittersweet debut novel. Growing up on an Iowa farm in the 1920s, Ruth Sheehan longs to fly like the glamorous lady barnstormers of the decade, but she isn't even permitted to go to nursing school. When pilot Henry Gutterson, a WWI vet, lands his airmail plane in her parents' field, she's given a chance at love and at flight. As Henry's wife, Ruth navigates his airmail routes in their fragile Jenny, "the Model T" of planes. Pregnancy grounds her, but still she wants "to feel the world fall away from her, to feel the land flatten out and spread" in flight. When her second child dies, Ruth, convinced it is somehow her fault, retreats into private sorrow. She finds some comfort in writing unsolicited and unanswered letters to famous aviatrixes, especially to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, with whom she empathizes for the loss of her child. Though Henry, too, eventually quits flying, years later he encourages Ruth to renew her dream, to fly solo at last, at the age of 80. But Ruth and Henry then disappear during a Thanksgiving holiday, and their grown children must piece together the events of their last days. The trove of Ruth's letters reveals to them the desires and hopes she had long hidden. Hughes tells Ruth's story quietly and compassionately, and readers may brush away tears at the novel's affecting ending.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0393326225
• ISBN 13: 9780393326222
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 312