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After reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as "Terra Incognita" and "The Magnetic North", Sara Wheeler rediscovered America thirty-five years after her first Greyhound trip across the country. She returns in turbulent midlife to trace the steps of six women who fled various sorts of trouble in nineteenth-century England and went to the United States to reinvent themselves. Her travel companions include Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and author of the biting "Domestic Manners of the Americans"; the actress Fanny Kemble, who shocked the nation with her passionate first-hand indictment of slavery; the prolifically pamphleteering economist Harriet Martineau; the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, who had never been more than twelve miles from her Yorkshire village before she sailed to the New World; the traveller Isabella Bird, whose many ailments remained in check as long as she was scaling the Rockies; and the novelist Catherine Hubback, niece of Jane Austen, who deposited her husband in a madhouse and rode the brand-new rails to San Francisco. Tough-minded outsiders, these women's truest qualities emerged in a country as incomplete and tentative as their native land was staid and settled. And they discovered second acts for themselves at a time when the world expected them to disappear politely.
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Previews available in: English
Edition | Availability |
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1
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World
2014, Penguin Random House
in English
0099541343 9780099541349
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3
O my America!: six women and their second acts in a new world
2013, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
in English
- First American edition.
0374298815 9780374298814
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Traces the steps of six women--author Fanny Trollope, actress Fanny Kemble, economist Harriet Martineau, homesteader Rebecca Burlend, traveler Isabella Bird, and novelist Catherine Hubback--who came to America in the nineteenth century to start new lives.
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