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Reviews
Mary Hallock Foote: Author-Illustrator of the American West
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By Darlis Miller
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University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2002. Oklahoma Western Biographies, vol. 19. Photographs, bibliography, index. 315 pages. $29.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Judy Nolte Temple
University of Arizona, Tucson
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Those unfamiliar with the remarkable western figure Mary Hallock
Foote (1847–1938) will be impressed by this comprehensive
biography by historian Darlis Miller. Those who already know about
Foote will relish the delicious nuggets from her correspondence
that Miller provides as well as the biographer's insights into the
complex tensions that dogged this "Victorian gentlewoman in the
far West" as she accompanied her engineer husband on his many assignments
and carved out her own career as well. This traditionally constructed
biography admirably balances an account of the major events in Foote's
life, a summary of her artistic and literary achievements, and an
analysis of the challenges this nineteenth-century woman faced.
Those challenges have a contemporary familiarity: marriage versus
profession, family responsibility versus artistic vision, East and
kin versus West and opportunity, and natural environment versus
economic development.
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The purist might wonder why such a biography is needed, since Foote, a professional author, wrote her own luminescent reminiscences, which were carefully reassembled by mining historian Rodman Paul and published in 1980 as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Occasionally, when Miller quotes a wonderful passage by Foote, a reader might wish he or she were reading "the original." Miller's research provides contextual information, however, that all the more enriches our admiration for Mary Hallock Foote. For example, Miller tells us in great detail why Foote was considered the foremost female illustrator of her time. Miller also provides samples of Foote's correspondence with publishers that show how vigorously this "gentlewoman" negotiated for decent fees as she grew confident in her talents and evolved into the major financial supporter of her family. On some occasions that family overwhelmed her, especially when they lived in crowded quarters located, ironically, in the vast open spaces of the Boise River Valley in Idaho or Grass Valley, California. Foote wrote to her best friend back East, "I am daily chopped in little pieces and passed around and devoured and expected to be whole again next day, and all days. And I am never alone, for a single minute!" (p. 116). |
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Miller analyzes the major theme of Foote's life — the tension between building a sense of home and community in the East or in the West — in a thoughtful way. This is a far more empathetic treatment of Foote's deep-seated traditional female values than was Wallace Stegner's in his novel Angle of Repose. Stegner's heroine was petulant, whereas Miller demonstrates how Mary Hallock Foote grew in maturity to understand that the debate over the geographical location of "home" was ultimately moot to those bred in the magnificent wild places of the West: "While we are striving in exile in order that we may one day take our children home, they are striking deep roots into this alien soil, and may not consent to call any other home" (p. 200). |
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I predict that those introduced to Mary Hallock Foote via Miller's biography will be eager to pursue Foote's own voice in her reminiscences of life in places as varied as Monterrey, Mexico, and Leadville, Colorado. Miller's selective synopses of Foote's fiction serve as a guide for those who want to see firsthand why Scribner's and the Atlantic Monthly vied for her works. A substantial bibliography closes this biography in which Miller encourages us, with contagious zest, to learn more about Foote. |
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