A Sweet, Separate Intimacy (paper)

Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800–1922

Edited by Susan Cummins Miller

In this book are bits and pieces of dreams, lives, experiences, and vistas, like squares cut from old cloth and assembled into a crazy quilt of writing styles and forms. The patchwork design mirrors both the complexity of the chroniclers and the stark lines and angles of the American frontier. —Susan Cummins Miller, from the introduction“This book deserves a place alongside other compilations of women’s experience of the early days out West.” --Enchantment“This useful and accessible collection has great appeal for general readers with an interest in western, nineteenth-century, or women’s history. Moreover, college and high school instructors will find it a welcome source and textbook.” —Journal of Arizona History j“Not simply paeans to the West, the selections examine substantive social, political, and racial themes and explore issues of identity, marriage, and autonomy.” —Choice “The frontier and American women are intertwined in the collected pieces through the issues of race, the clash of indigenous and invading or intermingling cultures. The feminine voice is heard throughout—voices rich in detail and less impaired by territorial imperative.” —Journal of the West“The editor possesses a sure grasp of the sorts of topics and themes that are likely to interest contemporary readers with a literary bent. . . . A lot of the frontier women’s fiction reprinted in Miller’s compendium is fetching and not easy to find. . . . Enchanting stories like these not only indicate the richness of Miller’s selections, but offer readers plenty of food for thought about the imaginative life of their frontier authors.” --Chiron Review 85 (Winter 2008)“The materials in this collection provide a vivid portrait of nineteenth-century frontier life. . . .This volume will be particularly valuable for teachers and students of western literature. . . . Texas Tech University Press should be commended for once more making this collection available to students of the American frontier.” —Cynthia Culver Prescott, New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 3In this anthology of thirty-four writers who published during the settlement years of the American frontier, Miller assembles nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and occasional writings from women of Anglo, Chinese, Hispanic, and Native American ethnicity. Variously addressing such themes as isolation, drudgery, friendship, mourning, and even mysticism, these writers offer up a different frontier, one that focuses on women’s experiences as much as men’s. In brief biographical and historical introductions to each writer, Miller shares insights and context as engaging as the selections themselves.

Susan Cummins Miller is also the author of the Frankie MacFarlane Mysteries (TTUP). She worked as a field geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and taught geology and oceanography before turning to writing full time. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where the kinship she feels to frontier women writers continues to inspire her work.

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