Lady's Choice: Ethel Waxham's Journals and Letters, 1905-1910

by Ethel Waxham

Book Overview

When John McPhee discovered these journals he found that Ethel Waxham wrote with such wit, insight, grace, irony, compassion, sarcasm, stylistic elegance, and embracing humor that I could not resist her. Waxham was a Wellesley graduate who decided in 1905 to accept a teaching job at a one-room school in Wyoming. Viewers of the the PBS series The West, in which this material was used, will enjoy this intimate look at her five-year courtship by John...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826317863
• ISBN13: 9780826317865
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Lady's Choice

If you are looking for a book that captures the real-life essence of the hardship and romance of the American West, look no further; this book has it all. A wonderfully written story of the lives and loves of the ordinary pioneering people who made America great.

A Moving Collection

This collection is truly wonderful. Ethel Waxham and many of her correspondents are of such intelligence, perceptiveness, spirit, and wit that they are, as John McPhee says of Ethel Waxham in the Forward, irresistable. The jounal entries and the letters make it clear that the story of Ethel Waxham's journey from Wellesley to the ranch on Muskrat creek just south of Moneta was deeper and more complex than the story of the PBS series. The endnotes are particularly good -- a story in and of themselves. I do wish there were more pictures of the ranch itself and its surroundings (even from today), "where the gray hills lie, Eternally still, under the sky," and the people, and I wish that I could know more about Ethel Waxham and the authors of the letters. I also wish that the unpublished sources were available -- as they are by "EPW" and J. D. Love, both of whom are of indisputable eloquence, they would make wonderful reading. And finally, as stated by McPhee: "I will wait impatiently for the sampler" -- the collection ends in one sense where the adventure just begins, and I long to see more of the correspondence and hear more of the story of the life at the Ranch on Muskrat Creek.

LOVE ACROSS THE AGES

When John McPhee published his now-classic RISING FROM THE PLAINS, he introduced Ethel Waxham Love in the first paragraph. All through the rest of the book he interwove her story with that of her son, Wyoming geologist David Love and the geology of the Great Plains. When fan mail came rolling in, readers wanted to know more about the "slim young woman" who stepped down from a train in Rawlings, Wyoming one fall morning in 1905.LADY'S CHOICE is Ethel Waxham Love's story. Her granddaughters, Barbara Love and Frances Love Froidevaux, have collected her writings -- journals, letters, poetry, essays, stories -- present them in combination with letters from her friends and classmates as well as from the man she would marry.Her story begins in the Fall of 1905. She has graduated from Wellesley and spent the Summer working as an assistant to her doctor father in Denver. When she gets the opportunity to teach in a log cabin schoolhouse in Wyoming, she accepts the offer. Her first journal entry describes her journey into the wilds of Wyoming by train, stage coach and wagon. With a sure pen and a sympathetic eye she records her impressions of the land, the people and events. Her observations are those of a sharp mind (she had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Wellesley, specializing in Greek, Latin and French), her descriptions are those of a major literary talent.Of one acquaintance she writes, "Mrs. Butler. . .is a little war-horse of a woman, with a long, thin husband. I'm telling you about her because she has been improving him for twenty years and it is beginning to tell on him."Her year in this community is surprisingly eventful, considering the isolation and the seeming lack of resources. But Ethel is a resourceful person, full of imagination, the kind of person who makes things happen. She visits friends, attends church services and "sociables," and dines in local restaurants. There are dances and suppers and school entertainments. And there is John Love, the man she will marry after the five-year courtship that is recorded here.She is enchanted by her surroundings. "The color of the white hills against the pale of the blue sky is most exquisite i the world. The cedars are gray with snow, the sagebrush white clumps of crystals. Where a long way off the sun touches the tops of the snow-covered hills there are shines a streak of silver. A whole white world was there, rising around us, as far as we could see; there did not appear to be such a thing as direction. Everywhere the whiteness, everywhere the hills. Where the stubble of the fields of the range rose above the snow,there was a shading of gold over the white. . .and when the full moon shines out of the deep dark night sky, the hills are like shining silver."You, too, will find a lady to love in these pages. Her journal begins as she stands on the threshold of her life, emerging from the chrysalis of a protected girlhood toward the challenge of womanhood. Here she records a land, a people, a life, a

Inside look at early west

Excellent book covering the lifes and loves of the two major characters. Not only good reading, but a very good insight into the manners, culture and living conditions in the early 1900's.

History we can all relate to....

Ethel Waxham1s journals and letters (both sent and recieved) from 1905-1910 tell the kind of American story that history books mostly only refer to, and then through an editorial filter that often simplifies or glorifies them out of their true, gritty, witty reality. Waxham graduated from Wellesley College in 1905, a Classics scholar. Within a few months, and forecasting her independent spirit, she was teaching in a one-room school in central Wyoming, as far from her background as a foreground can be. Over the next five years, her mailbox serves as a kind of telescope, bringing into view the incongruous disparities of Time and Place. In the same letters are the unlikely combinations ofwindswept treeless wilderness and life in a sheepherder1s wagon in winter hard beside the railroad, telegraph, telephone, a teachers1 convention, or a fancy box of chocolates pulled from under a horse-and-buggy seat to pass an all-day ride to town. The reader is experiencing America1s adolescence, that period of intense, rapid growth in which can be seen simultaneously the Past and the Future untangling themselves. But this is only the setting. Better than in a novel, we have the person of Ethel, the woman of extraordinary observation and insight and the expressive language to share them as she is drawn into this harsh but beautiful life and world. And her counterpart, the Scottish sheep baron/rancher John Galloway Love, who reportedly knew Butch Cassidy and who thought little of riding seventy miles in a day to carry on his apparently futile, and almost completely epistolary, five-year courtship of the schoolmarm. Ethel1s college friends begin to think that she is the model for the heroine in Owen Wister1s The Virginian (1902), yet Ethel is the real thing. And unlike in fiction, where the author is chosing each narrative step, each exchange of dialogue in a calculated fashion, Ethel and John correspond over the years completely spontaneously. The letters are full of mostly inconsequential detail--a kind of literary pointilism--any one of which makes no real difference. But magically, they create portraits even truer to life than the best fiction. The reader may discover, well into the book, that he or she seems to know Ethel Waxham better than all but one1s best friends. And she is so worth knowing, both for herself and for her complex portrait of the American West at the turn of the century. This is the same John Love and Ethel Waxham, the same Love Ranch that is featured prominently in Ken Burns1s television series, The West. And it is John Love1s son, David, growing up there, who becomes the geologist profiled in John McPhee1s Rising From the Plains. For those who understand that the joy of history is the fitting together of many small pieces, Lady1s Choice is the edge and corner pieces that let you really get into the puzzle.