500 Great Books By Women discussion
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A New Home, Who'll Follow?
Pioneers and Seekers
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A New Home—Who'll Follow?, or Glimpses of Western Life - Caroline Kirkland
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Edgar Allan Poe thought Kirkland was a significant American author. No wonder GR doesn't have anything on her.



"...Using her own experience of moving to an unsettled village in Michigan in the 1830s, Caroline Kirkland not only describes the life and times of individuals immersed in the growth and establishment of a community, but also subtly imbues her text with a sophisticated cultural criticism. As a displaced Easterner and newly identified Westerner, writing under the name Mary Clavers, she describes mud holes, drunken husbands, local politics, and Victorian American values in her witty and often sharply ironic voice: "I should be disposed to recommend a course of Michigan to the Sybarites, the puny exquisites, the world-worn and sated Epicureans of our cities. If I mistake not, they would make surprising advances in philosophy in the course of a few months' training."..."
(L.T.-S., p. 239)