cover image Women of the Gold Rush: ""The New Penelope"" and Other Stories

Women of the Gold Rush: ""The New Penelope"" and Other Stories

Frances Fuller Victor. Heyday Books, $12.95 (168pp) ISBN 978-1-890771-03-4

Prefaced by a brief biography, these five compelling short stories suggest a range of women's roles during the time of westward expansion. The heroines live by their wits and a triumphant will to survive. Mrs. Greyfield, in ""The New Penelope,"" recounts an odyssey that began with a fateful trip west from the Missouri River on a wagon train (with delicious parallels to Penelope's plight); a resourceful miner's wife transplanted from New York (""How Jack Hastings Sold His Mine""); and several women saddled with blackhearted men. The collection offers telling domestic details within a sweeping historic landscape, equally at home in a proper parlor where two friends take lemonade and in a ramshackle mining cabin. Here rugged adventure (journeys by wagon, rail and sea) is found alongside affecting emotional struggles (widows adjusting to single motherhood or eking out a living). Victor originally published The New Penelope and Other Stories (as a volume including a novella, 10 short stories and 40 poems) in 1877; the fictional works included here--two of which, Egli reasons, were based on Victor's column about San Francisco for the Evening Bulletin--are gripping tales full of historical interest. (Oct.)