Elinore P. Stewart was commissioned by Atlantic Monthly magazine to allow her personal letters to be published. She wrote often to Mrs. Coney, apparently a lady whom she cared for a great deal and this comes across in her charming letters. Once her letters begin to be published, she receives letters from subscribers who wish to rapport with her. She is open about her feelings as well as descriptive in her accounts of daily life. Many readers felt she only wrote about the good parts and was not being realistic. As one knows, there are many different kinds of people in the world and to me, Elinore is a woman who tries to see the best in life despite hardships and trials. It would have been easy to write about the discomforts but she was writing to her friends and was pouring out part of her true soul in her letters.
This particular edition includes many of her letters which were not published and you can see the difference as she writes so much more freely than her other two books of letters. This is my favorite edition as I get more than a peek at who Elinore really is as a person at that time and place. She takes pains to describe nature and people, especially to Mrs. Coney who is blind. I really enjoyed reading her letters and do recommend that if you have any interest in how life was back then for the woman homesteader, give this book a try. Elinore describes herself as very plain but her writing is anything but; in fact it is rather charming and touching. Her love for her friends and family comes across as well as her thoughts about some of the people she lives near and encounters.

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