O My America!

Product Description

After reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as Terra Incognita" & " The Magnetic North" Sara Wheeler rediscovered America thirty-five years after her first Greyhound trip across the country. She returns in turbulent midlife to trace the steps of six women who fled various sorts of trouble in nineteenth-century England & went to the United States to reinvent themselves. Her travel companions include Fanny Trollope mother of Anthony & author of the biting " Domestic Manners of the Americans"; the actress Fanny Kemble who shocked the nation with her passionate first-hand indictment of slavery; the prolifically pamphleteering economist Harriet Martineau; the homesteader Rebecca Burlend who had never been more than twelve miles from her Yorkshire village before she sailed to the New World; the traveller Isabella Bird whose many ailments remained in check as long as she was scaling the Rockies; & the novelist Catherine Hubback niece of Jane Austen who deposited her husband in a madhouse & rode the br&-new rails to San Francisco. Tough-minded outsiders these women's truest qualities emerged in a country as incomplete & tentative as their native land was staid & settled. & they discovered second acts for themselves at a time when the world expected them to disappear politely. From the swampy heat of Georgia's Sea Islands to the icy purity of the Cascades Sara Wheeler finds their path & her own."