Biography of Cleary, a nineteenth century Nebraska writer whose sketches, short stories, essays, and poetry concentrated on the experiences of pioneer women
Susanne K. George is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She is the author of The Adventures of The Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart, also available in a Bison Books edition.
"Even without the Cleary texts this would be an absorbing read, as George constructs, at times using marvellous letters, the story of a young woman born in 1863 to a cultured family, who went west with her new businessman husband to live in a Nebraska town which had not existed four years previously. There she continued to write, bore six children (speaking of her fear of childbirth, the 'black shadow'), and endured the death of two of them and an eight-year-long morphine addiction started after puerperal fever. Returning after fourteen years to Chicago, she wrote more... She lived her last three years in single rented rooms writing to eat and to pay off hospital bills [and] the rent of her typewriter, ... and was often down to less than a dollar."--American Studies "Fascinating ... Kate M. Cleary shows the disillusionment of the female artist as she carefully chronicles her personal life, her birthing pain, her misunderstood creative endeavours, and her loss of husband and children. As readers, we empathise with Kate M. Cleary's nineteenth-century world. Her sketches, short stories, essays, and poetry focus on more than the female pioneer; rather, they depict frontier life on the plains."--Nebraska History
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