Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919

16. “Nurslings of the Sky,” from The Land of Little Rain (1903)

16 “Nurslings of the Sky,” from The Land of Little Rain (1903) Mary Hunter Austin mary hunter austin (1868–1934), born on September 9, 1868, in Carlinville, Illinois, was one of nine children (of whom four survived) of a lawyer, George, and a teacher, Susanna. Her childhood interests in nature and literature were stimulated when, after graduating from Blackburn College in 1888, she and her widowed mother moved to California. After touring San Francisco and Los Angeles, they settled in the San Joaquin Valley. Overland travel inspired Austin’s early essay, “One Hundred Miles on Horseback.” In 1892 Austin married Wallace Stafford Austin and moved to Lone Pine, California, in the shadow of Mount Whitney, which inspired further writing. Her husband, however, was critical of her writing and her politics; she in turn resented domestic duties, which she felt constrained her creative energies. They had one daughter, Ruth, who was finally institutionalized for severe mental disability. While in California, Austin traveled to Carmel, where she met such writers as Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and Mark Twain. She began publishing in literary magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly and Munsey’s. In 1903 she published her first book, The Land of Little Rain, a narrative sympathetically observing the landscape and wildlife around the Mojave Desert. The following excerpt, a chapter near the end of The Land of Little Rain, captures Austin’s keen environmental 340 sensibility, her gift for metaphor, and her attention to the evocative power of landscape.Austin traveled frequently throughout California and to New York City, separating from her husband in 1914 and stepping up her work in support of the women’s suffrage movement and the Women’s Political Union. In 1924 she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and built a home that she called Casa Querida. In Santa Fe Austin became active in indigenous rights movements and published The Land of Journey’s Ending. Her New Mexico literary circle included D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Her political activism is reflected in several of her novels, including such feminist novels as A Woman of Genius (1912) and No. 26 Jayne Street (1920). Austin was also a prodigious writer of poetry, plays, short stories, and essays, although she was plagued by physical and emotional ailments—what now might be called eating disorders, along with several breakdowns, breast cancer, and heart attacks. In 1932 Austin assembled a series of autobiographical sketches linking herself to nature, published as Earth Horizon, that innovatively tell her story through a combination of the third-person character “Mary” and the first-person reflexive “I.” She died in 1934. Critics have noted Austin’s prescient attention to autobiographical reflexivity and her situating of subjectivity in an interplay with richly detailed regions of the Southwest. Melody Graulich’s essays, as well as many other essays on Austin, offer suggestive analyses of a writer whose importance for life narrative is yet to be fully recognized. Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin and Company The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1903. Nurslings of the Sky Choose a hill country for storms. There all the business of the weather is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in familiarity. When you come to think about it, the disastrous storms are on the levels, sea “Nurslings of the Sky” 341 or sand or plains. There you get only a hint of what is about to happen, the fume of the gods rising from their meeting place under the rim of the world; and when it breaks upon you there is no stay nor shelter. The terrible mewings and mouthings of a Kansas wind have the added terror of viewlessness. You are lapped in them like uprooted grass; suspect them of a personal grudge. But the storms of hill countries have other business. They scoop watercourses, manure, the pines, twist them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and spars, and, if you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs, do you no harm. They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings , and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take chances. So they did in Overtown who built in the wash of Argus water, and at Kearsarge at the foot of a steep, treeless swale. After...