WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST, 1833–1927

Abstract

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST, 1833-1927. By Nina Baym. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2011. 371 pp. $32, paperback; $40, cloth.Nina Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 expands some common notions of literature created by women about the American western experience by including not only recognized canonical writers such as Willa Cather and Mary Austin but also obscure writers and writers who enjoyed limited regional appeal. Baym engages in the conversation about what sorts of writing should be treated as literature about the West by including not just the writings of women who were from western states and territories but also writers who wrote about the West without having been there. In scholarship treating literature of the American West, there exist a number of questions, including inquiries about authorship, perspective, marginalization, appropriation, and literary value of texts and writers. Baym's book reflects the wide range of women's writing across western states during a time of Manifest Destiny, westward expansion, settlement, and, ultimately, urbanization; it is polyvalent insofar as it includes not only the expected settlers' diaries, captivity narratives, and dime store cowboy novels but also poetry, romance novels, memoirs, state and regional histories, and children's literature.Baym begins in 1833 with Mary Austin Holley's Notes on Texas and ends in 1927 with Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Chapters, most organized by region, include Texas and Oklahoma, the Pacific Northwest, Upper California and Nevada, Utah, Colorado, the Great Plains, the High Plains, Southern California and Nevada, the Southwest, and one about movement called "On the Trail, On the Road." By both examining an array of texts by diverse authors and organizing the texts by region, Baym creates a fuller picture of women's literary engagement with the West. In so doing, she investigates what literature is worthy of consideration and which writers create this literature, thereby contributing significantly to the conversation involving what we consider to be literature about the WestBaym anticipates two major potential criticisms of her work. She acknowledges that she "sacrifice[s] depth for breadth, describing rather than analyzing" (2), and likewise acknowledges the Anglo-centrism of her work: "[One] might have hoped for a significant counternarrative in books by women associated with minority status. Regrettably, I found only nineteen such women, less than 6 percent of the total. These nineteen women, too, accepted Anglo dominance as a historical reality" (4). Forewarned of the "reality" of the types of writing and authors included, the reader can set about the business of exploring region by region the surprising diversity of literature produced by such writers as Alice S. and Emma Wolf, who wrote novels about San Francisco's Jewish community and society; Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, author of The Squatter and the Don (1885), the first known novel published by a Mexican American woman; Augusta Crocheron, a Mormon poet; and Emma Ray, a Seattle missionary and memoirist. Some authors are well-respected fixtures of the American literary landscape- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kathleen Norris, and Willa Cather-while others, such as Narcissa Owen, Aileen Nusbaum, and M. E. M. Davis, have achieved regional prominence. Throughout, Baym's survey challenges notions of what it is to be a "Writer of the American West."By presenting the works and authors in a region-by-region survey, Baym unearths an astonishing amount of writing by women writers about the region west of the Mississippi that has been heretofore neglected, filling a tremendous gap in American literary studies. This organization allows her to be both meticulous and catholic in her selection. Some writers have been recovered while others have been elevated from mere regional importance. For students and researchers investigating the types of literature produced, such an overview has been lacking. …