Customer Reviews

A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (Huntington Library Classics)

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Mary Hallock Foote came west with her engineer husband Arthur D. Foote, a dreamer-engineer, to build dams, lay out canals, and tame the vast desert areas. While they waited through one frustration after another with various backers, she kept the family solvent with her delightful sketches and stories, all the while raising her children on the boundary of civilization. Oh, that's with the help of a proper English tutor, of course.

Her prose is grandiloquent in the early chapters, something of an annoying Victorian mannerism in my mind. She lavishes compliments with abandon on her family and associates, as well as the landscape. Thank goodness the editors carefully footnoted Mrs. Foote! Otherwise the reader wouldn't have a clue as to whom she was writing about so ecstatically. (Actually, the volume is soundly annotated and edited throughout.)

However, in the later chapters, when the family settles down in Idaho, near what was to be the highest dam in the world at the time, the Arrowrock, her prose deepens and her style strengthens. She begins to incorporate her western life, the engineers and workers lives, into her stories. The geological phrase, "Angle of Repose," emerges in this section. The prose, like the work, becomes purposeful in its passion.

Is is, after all, of Mary Hallock Foote and her husband, Arthur, that Wallace Stegner wrote in his Pulitzer prize-winning fictional account, "The Angle of Repose." Here we really get the story in the words of those who lived it.

The frustrations of engineering the dam and engineering the financial and political backing are superbly related. The latter half of the book is more than worth the slower early portion. The account it bears of life in the early western United States is a treasure of its times. I heartily recommend it.

Read Angle of Repose and then read this. Each book makes the other one even more touching and interesting.