Idaho Commission for Libraries

A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1972) presents the reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, the cultivated Eastern wife of an engineer, who came to the Boise River Canyon in the 1880s. Foote, an illustrator and writer of short stories and sketches, chronicles her ambivalence to Idaho and to the West—she loves the harsh beauty of the land, but dislikes the isolation and the debilitating roughness of the life for women.

Mary Hallock Foote, born in New York State in 1847 to a Quaker family, was formally trained as an artist. Coming west as a bride with her husband in the 1870s, she lived in Colorado, Mexico, Idaho, and California, contributing stories and drawings about life in the West to a variety of Eastern periodicals; some of these are collected in The Idaho Stories and Far West Illustrations of Mary Hallock Foote (Idaho State University Press, 1988).

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