cover image The Adventures of the Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart

The Adventures of the Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Susanne K. George, Susanne George Bloomfield. University of Nebraska Press, $25 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-8032-2141-3

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 George, an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska, has compiled and edited Stewart's unpublished letters and stories together with interesting biographical research.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. (Nov.)