Research Catalog

Title

O my America! : second acts in a New World / Sara Wheeler.

Author

Wheeler, Sara.

Publication

London : Jonathan Cape, 2013.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 267 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

After reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as "Terra Incognita" and "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 and went to the United States to reinvent themselves. Her travel companions include Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and 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; and the novelist Catherine Hubback, niece of Jane Austen, who deposited her husband in a madhouse and rode the brand-new rails to San Francisco. Tough-minded outsiders, these women's truest qualities emerged in a country as incomplete and tentative as their native land was staid and settled. And they discovered second acts for themselves at a time when the world expected them to disappear politely.

Subject

• 1800-1899
• Women travelers > United States > Biography
• Women travelers > United States > History > 19th century
• United States > Social conditions > 19th century

Genre/Form

• Biographies
• History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Merely telling the truth : Fanny Trollope goes to Ohio -- Brave new world : Fanny Kemble goes to Georgia -- A great embryo poet : Harriet Martineau goes to Massachusetts and Kentucky -- Is this America? : Rebecca Burlend goes to Illinois -- Above love and hate : Isabella Bird goes to Colorado -- No there there : Catherine Hubback goes to California.

ISBN

• 9780224090704 (hbk.)
• 0224090704 (hbk.)
• 9781409029441 (ebook)
• 1409029441 (ebook)

OCLC

• 819519298
• SCSB-12102100

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library