Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote

Megan Riley McGilchrist's book explores the life of Mary Hallock Foote, an accomplished American author and illustrator who lived in the 19th century. It combines scholarship, critical thinking, and personal interaction with Foote's illustrations and writings to provide insight into her life as an exile, her connection with nature, and her transformation. The book also examines the role that nature and her lifelong connection with the natural world played in her adaptation to the western mining towns where she spent much of her life.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 204 pages
Publication date: 30 November 2021
Publisher: University of Nevada Press

Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote offers a captivating window into the remarkable and little-known nineteenth-century personal history of accomplished American author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote. A woman both of her time and ahead of it, Mary's journey from a successful career in New York to the Western frontier is a testament to her resilience and adaptability. When she followed her husband, a mining engineer, to the West, she found herself in a new and often challenging world, sometimes feeling like an exile. The thousands of pages of her unpublished letters, which form the foundation of this book, provide rare insight into the process of acculturation and the eventual transformation she experienced.

This wide-ranging analysis also examines the role that nature and Mary's lifelong connection with the natural world played in her adaptation to the western mining towns where she spent much of the rest of her life. In many ways, Mary's life mirrored that of author Megan Riley McGilchrist, whose parallel exile began in 1977 when she left America for England. Drawing equivalences between Mary's life as an exile and her own life as an expatriate American woman, Megan provides a meditation on her own transformation, as much as on Mary's. Megan demonstrates what it has been like to be a twenty-first-century American expatriate, Californian-turned-Londoner, to find common ground in the life of a nineteenth-century woman.

Comprising elements of biography, literary analysis, history, and personal history, Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote offers a rich and multifaceted exploration of a remarkable woman's life. It sheds light on the complexities of exile, the significance of nature, and the enduring power of personal connections across time and cultures. This book will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of western literature, women's studies, and the history of the American West, as well as anyone interested in the human experience of adaptation and transformation.

Weight: 322g
Dimension: 154 x 229 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781647790189