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182 Western American Literature twin sister, a relationship concealed by Amos, once again because of greed. Amos’s only loved son, Ranse, escapes his father’s possessiveness through sui­ cide. And retarded sister Lily Mae haunts them all. The grim story ends with Amos dead, Ranse dead, Buck dying, and Wacker headed for prison after going berserk when Farley attempts to repossess the farm. Carrie is pregnant. Mammie rocks and grieves, her only comfort a sepiatinted photograph of Amos with his three smiling sons around the syrup mill. Wacker knows what liesbehind those smiles. The town now knows the rest. Author McGinnis has been a careful observer in those formative years he spent in Comanche County, Texas. His ear is fine-tuned to the nuances of West Central Texas talk. His creative imagination constructs a grim but plausible plot. What he did not have for this novel, however, was an editor who would insist on elimination of boring repetition and tedious revelation. The tightly-structured work resulting might have been an admirable novella. LOU RODENBERGER, Abilene, Texas Women and Western American Literature. Edited by Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski. (New York: Whitston, 1982. 331 pages, $22.50.) The recent appearance of books on the role of women in the settlement of the West has dispelled many myths. The reassessment of western women is due partly to historians’discovery that women are a recoverable part of the past because of the thousands of letters, diaries and reminiscences that consti­ tute a valuable historical resource. Editors Stauffer and Rosowski state in their preface that “this collection of essays grew naturally from our awareness that women have been — and still are — largely excluded from discussions of literature of the American West” (p. v). The collection grew out of the Western American Literature Association’s 1980 annual meeting, when west­ ern women scholars decided to reexamine the literary and historical versions of women in the West. The selections of the editors are interesting, and I might add, excellent. Marie Rosenblatt provides the translation of Darlene Ritter’s grandmother’s letters. Marie Louis Ritter, a Swiss immigrant, wrote to her relatives in Switzerland telling of the sorrow, hardship and loneliness on the Nebraska frontier in the 1890s. Other essays include Margaret Solomon’s account of Julia Archibald Holmes’s experiences in the gold rush to Pikes Peak; Susan Armitage discusses the “Reluctant Pioneers,” those women who resisted and often resented the uprooting, but were powerless in a marital relationship when it was a wife’s duty to follow her husband;Barbara Meldrum, in one of the best essaysin the volume, entitled “Women in Western American Fiction,” explores several novels, in particular Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man, and concludes that it and others — Willa Gather’s The Song of the Lark, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Frederick Manfred’s The Manly-Hearted Woman Reviews 183 — are some “of the most eloquent tributes to woman that can be found in fiction” (p. 56). The myths surrounding Sacajawea are examined by David Remley; mis­ cegenation in popular western literature is the subject of an interesting study by Caren J. Deming, and Frances W. Kaye finds Hamlin Garland puzzling as an American male feminist writer, concluding he “was unable to come to terms with the question of woman’ssexuality” (p. 136). Several essays address the effect the distortion of truth has upon women: John Murphy, Wister’s Virginian and Cather’s My Antonia; Catherine D. Farmer, Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth', Joseph J. Wydeven’s focus on Wright Morris’s Plains Song for Female Voices, and good essays on Jean Stafford, Mari Sandoz, Constance Rourke (on whom we have little good criticism), Eudora Welty, Mary Austin, and an almost unknown American Indian poet, Paula Gunn Allen. Here too is Frances M. Malpezzi’sview of Frank Waters’s The Woman at Otowi Crossing, a sympathetic portrait of Helen Chalmers based upon the life of a Baptist minister’s daughter at the beginning of the Atomic Age, and Kathleen L. Nichols’s assessment of Agnes Smedley’s autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth. There are Sue Mathews’sinterviews with Dorothy Johnson and A. B. Guthrie, Jr., in which...

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