The Adventures of The Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart (Women in the West) - Hardcover

Bloomfield, Susanne George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080322141X ISBN 13: 9780803221413

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1992

Synopsis

Generations of readers have delighted in Elinore Pruitt Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) and Letters on an Elk Hunt (1915), among the most engaging accounts of life in the American West. Stewart related her adventures on an isolated Wyoming homestead with such vividness, gusto, and sympathy that she has become the woman homesteader. Until now, however, little has been known about her except what she chose to reveal in her published letters.

Old friends and new acquaintances alike will welcome this book combining Stewart's previously unpublished or uncollected letters with Susanne K. George's extensive research. Here is as full and candid a portrait as wella re ever likely to have of The Woman Homesteader: the illness, disappointments, and grinding hard work that lay behind her genial public persona; the family, neighbors, and correspondents who peopled her letter-stories and shared her life.

George has discovered in Elinore Pruitt Stewart a story fully as rewarding as any told by the Woman Homesteader herself. In an afterword George considers Stewart's use of fictional devices and her growth as a writer as well as her place in American letters.

About this title

About the Author

Susanne K. George is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Kearney who specializes in western and women's literature.

Reviews

Despite a life of extreme poverty and hard work homesteading on the Wyoming frontier, Elinore Pruitt Stewart (1876-1933) found time to record her experiences working the land in correspondence to family and friends and to publish it as Letters of a Woman Homesteader in 1914. George, an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska, has compiled and edited Stewart's unpublished letters and stories together with interesting biographical research. From it, she theorizes that Stewart's published letters were less authentic and more skillfully crafted than thought at the time and that they gave a partially fictionalized picture of frontier life. The letters, which will be of interest to feminist historians, reveal Stewart as a joyful and talented survivor who wrote powerfully, particularly about the natural world, and earned her place in literary history. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080322141X
• ISBN 13: 9780803221413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240