"Secret to be Burried": The Diary and Life of Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1858-1888 (A Bur oak original) - Softcover

Emily Hawley Gillespie; Judy Nolte Lensink

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877452377 ISBN 13: 9780877452379

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 1996

Synopsis

The sound of nineteenth-century women, once thought lost to us, is alive because ordinary women like Emily Hawley Gillespie gave voice to their thoughts in diaries. This condensed version of the 2,500-page journals of Emily Gillespie, faithfully written from 1858 to 1888, is a detailed account of rural Iowa life. More than this, it contains the reflections of a woman who dreamed of being a painter and writer and instead became a wife and a mother, a woman whose radical convictions were recorded in her diary, while publicly she conformed to the prescribed life of a Victorian pioneer woman. Through Emily's journals, readers are offered immediate and unmodified contact with settlers in Iowa one hundred years ago. A wealth of facts are includedOCowhat produce she harvested and preserved from her garden, how her husband tended his fields and what he raised, the challenges and rewards of family life.Judy Lensink's skillful analysis shows the larger patterns in Emily Gillespie's life and provides keys that unlock the diary's secrets. Emily's life is revealed as a youth full of promise fading into middle and declining years of lost dreams and eventual tragedy, which caused her to write, I have written "many" things in my journal, but the worst is a secret to be burried when I shall cease to be."

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0877452377
• ISBN 13: 9780877452379
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 445