The award-winning author of "Terra Incognita "tracks six women
who transformed themselves in the New World
In "O My America ," the travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler
embarks on a journey across the United States, guided by the
adventures of six women who reinvented themselves as they chased
the frontier west.
Wheeler's career has propelled her from pole to pole, but as she
stared down the uncharted territory of middle age, she found
herself in need of a guide. "Fifty is a tough age," she writes.
"Role models are scarce for women contemplating a second act."
Scarce, that is, until she stumbled upon Fanny Trollope.
In 1827, Fanny, mother of Anthony, swapped England for Ohio, where
failure hounded her for years before she wrote the sensational
travel account "Domestic Manners of the Americans." She was
forty-nine when she set out for America, and she led Wheeler to
other trailblazers: the actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, the
radical sociologist Harriet Martineau, the homesteader Rebecca
Burlend, the traveler Isabella Bird, and the novelist Catherine
Hubback.
Wheeler tracks her bright and spirited subjects from the
Mississippi to the cinder cones of the Mayacamas. "I had more fun
writing this book than all my previous books put together," she
claims--and it shows. Ambitious and full of life, "O My America "is
not only a great writer's reckoning with a young country but also
an exuberant tribute to fresh starts, second acts, and six
unstoppable women.
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