For nearly half a century, siblings John and Mary McLoughlin engaged in an unbroken correspondence. This exchange of heartfelt fictional letters, based upon their life histories, took place against a background of tumultuous change, and whilst they themselves were undoubtedly affected by these changes and the inevitable ravages of time, their love for and loyalty to one another remained steadfast. At the turn of the nineteenth century, British colonial Canada and America sought to define their borders as the French lost their control of the continent, exhausted by the terror and bloodbath of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars respectively. In this time of upheaval, the lives of the siblings diverged into two very different paths. Mary entered a convent of Ursuline Sisters in Quebec City, whilst John became active in the fur trade, a vagabond life fraught with loneliness, physical hardship and corrosive competition; the polar opposite of the cloistered life his sister led as a Bride of Christ. However, a cloistered life did not restrict Mary's sharp and eager mind; she knew only too well that for a country in the throes of a difficult birth, a certain amount of religious observance was essential for even a glimmer of much-needed political stability in the physical world her brother moved in. Throughout the decades, each guides the other through bereavement, physical pain, and the growth of their family, and ultimately, their rise to the top of their respective fields; Mary to the role of Mother Superior and John to the "Father of Oregon", their deaths followed by the birth of two nations whose infancy they also shared.
This is a biography of a woman who, for all her romances, tribulation, and despair, was determined to shape an identity for herself in a fast changing world. Cynthia Stockley, who became one of the most widely read writers of the early twentieth century, was born in South Africa in 1873. Her romantic novels and short stories sold in their tens of thousands from London to New York, Los Angeles to Sydney and Perth, to Canada, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. Her most acclaimed novel Poppy went through thirty editions and sold over a million copies. The nine silent films based on her books were shown in cities and towns all over the world. Every phase of her life had its dramas - the Shona Rising in Rhodesia in the 1890s, the stage in London, married life in New York, life as a writer on the Left Bank in Paris in the first World War, time on the veld as a farmer's wife in Rhodesia. The biography shows how closely her romantic novels draw on her own experiences of anguish, dejection, and thoughts of suicide: love wins through in spite of despair, betrayal, and violence. More, than that she used writing to explore what it means to be a young, intelligent, gutsy female in a world run by men: how do social conventions, male expectations, the imperial agenda in Africa affect such a woman? How does she find the freedom, the liberty to be her true self in such a world? The facts of her life as we know them provide the basis to look at the fiction. Here we see the woman Stockley imagined she might have been, or how any woman could be if she struggled to find and assert her own identity. Her stories are repeatedly autobiographical. She comes through as an independent spirit creating her fiction against the experiences she'd known in milieus ranging from her childhood in the Boer Republic of the Orange Free State, to settler life in Rhodesia, to the arty ambience of Paris, to early twentieth-century New York, Jersey, and London. Reviewers called her humour 'scathing' and the writing 'powerful'. They remarked on her 'racy descriptions', giving readers the enjoyment of partaking in what was to many an exotic world, marked by the enthusiasm of empire and early colonial life. Her fiction had 'plenty of love, of a dashing, ingenious kind and plenty of incident, ' said a review in India. That's what readers could not get enough of, intimate lives of heroines played out in places and circumstances they could only imagine. Stockley recreated a world which has long disappeared, along with its political attitudes, prejudices, and agendas. Yet her life captures the challenges and strains of a single woman be it in Africa or Europe facing into the twentieth century.
As regards both academic historians and popular understandings since the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s, analysis of American fundamentalism has neglected a large body of literature about gender roles and social conventions. Betty A. DeBerg's groundbreaking study fills that important gap, analyzing the roots and character of fundamentalism in light of rapid changes and severe disruptions in gender-role ideology and actual social behavior in America between 1880 and 1930. Unlike interpreters such as George Marsden -- who has seen the contemporary Religious Right's concerns over feminism, abortion, and the breakdown of the family as recent developments -- DeBerg convincingly argues that these concerns were central in the "first wave of American fundamentalism."--Back cover.
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