A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West:
The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote
Starting with her nostalgically remembered childhood on a Quaker farm
on the Hudson River, Mary Hallock Foote tells the story of her training
as an artist in the 1860s and of her marriage to a mining engineer whose
jobs took the young couple west in the closing days of the frontier. She
left the east, but not her career in book illustration. While moving from
place to place with her husband, she also became a popular and widely
published author, describing in her novels what it meant to be a woman
in the American west during the late nineteenth century.
From the preface:
When Mary Hallock Foote was writing these reminiscences, she was aware
that she was telling two stories at once. The first story was her own:
a narrative of the mixed rewards and anxieties experienced by a sensitive
eastern lady of the Victorian era who was simultaneously wife and mother,
novelist and artist in the Far West. One learns the inner thoughts of
a singularly honest lady who took west with her the value system of the
genteel tradition and the social standards of the eastern upper class.
But Mary Hallock Foote's adjustment to the West involved much more than
her personal attitude. In an age in which few women had professional careers,
she became a highly successful writer and illustrator of "local color"
stories about the West. Even if she had mixed feelings about life out
there, nevertheless she learned to write about it and to draw it, and
thereby to reach an audience of thousands of easterners.
The second story told by Mary Hallock Foote was an intensely personal
explanation and defense of the role played in the West by the little group
of engineers to which her husband, brother-in-law, and their close friends
belonged. The engineers were a tiny and anomalous minority. Quite aside
from their tendency to think in terms of quantitative relationships, graphic
representation, strengths of materials, and natural phenomena, the engineers
were an oddity in this new region of self-made men because they had had
an extensive formal education and came often from sophisticated social
backgrounds—'professional exiles,' Mary Hallock Foote termed them.
They had long been a favorite subject for her short stories and novels;
now she was able to write about them in terms of episodes in her own life.
Mary Hallock, ca. 1874
The Footes' cabin at Leadville.
(Illustration by Mary Hallock Foote)
"The Water-Carrier of the Mexican Camp"
(Illustration by Mary Hallock Foote)
Copyright © 2003, Huntington Library Press.
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