A Secret to Be Burried : Diary Emily Hawley Gillespie / Judy Nolte Lensink.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Temple, Judy Nolte, 1948- author.

Series:

Bur oak book.

Bur Oak Book Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Country life--Iowa--History--19th century.

Country life.

Women--Iowa--History--19th century.

Women.

Iowa--Social life and customs.

Iowa.

Iowa--Biography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxvi, 445 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Iowa City, Iowa : University of Iowa Press, [1989]

Summary:

The sound of nineteenth-century women, once thought lost to us, is alive because ordinary women like Emily Hawley Gillespie gave voice to their thoughts in diaries. This condensed version of the 2, 500-page journals of Emily Gillespie, faithfully written from 1858 to 1888, is a detailed account of rural Iowa life. More than this, it contains the reflections of a woman who dreamed of being a painter and writer and instead became a wife and a mother, a woman whose radical convictions were recorded in her diary, while publicly she conformed to the prescribed life of a Victorian pioneer woman. Through Emily's journals, readers are offered immediate and unmodified contact with settlers in Iowa one hundred years ago. A wealth of facts are included-what produce she harvested and preserved from her garden, how her husband tended his fields and what he raised, the challenges and rewards of family life. Judy Lensink's skillful analysis shows the larger patterns in Emily Gillespie's life and provides keys that unlock the diary's secrets. Emily's life is revealed as a youth full of promise fading into middle and declining years of lost dreams and eventual tragedy, which caused her to write, "I have written many things in my journal, but the worst is a secret to be burried when I shall cease to be."

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Diary as Living History

Part I: "Untill the Right One": Emily Hawley, Unmarried Woman

1. "A Home at Father's": 1858- 1860

2. "We Cannot Always Live at Home": 1861-1862

3. Emily Hawley, Unmarried Woman

Part II: "We Are a Happy Family Circle": Emily Gillespie, Wife and Mother

4. "Seems Good to Know We Live at Home": 1862-1874

5. Emily Gillespie, Wife and Mother

Part III: "Woman Is Always Lovely-Until Her Strength &amp

Beauty Fail": Emily Hawley Gillespie, Woman

6. "Tis the Saddest . . . Merely to Be Always at Home": 1874- 1883

7. "No Home Here": 1883- 1888

8. Emily Hawley Gillespie, Woman

Conclusion: The Diary as Female Autobiography

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Bibliography: p. [431]-439.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781587291333

1587291339

OCLC:

44963518