"Even without the Cleary texts this would be an absorbing read, as George constructs, at times using marvelous letters, the story of a young woman born in 1863 to a cultured family, who went west with her new businessman husband to live in a Nebraska town which had not existed four years previously. There she continued to write, bore six children (speaking of her fear of childbirth, the 'black shadow'), and endured the death of two of them and an eight-year-long morphine addiction started after puerperal fever. Returning after fourteen years to Chicago, she wrote more... She lived her last three years in single rented rooms writing to eat and to pay off hospital bills [and] the rent of her typewriter, ... and was often down to less than a dollar."-American Studies American Studies "Fascinating ... Kate M. Cleary shows the disillusionment of the female artist as she carefully chronicles her personal life, her birthing pain, her misunderstood creative endeavors, and her loss of husband and children. As readers, we empathize with Kate M. Cleary's nineteenth-century world. Her sketches, short stories, essays, and poetry focus on more than the female pioneer; rather, they depict frontier life on the plains."-Nebraska History Nebraska History
