She left nothing in particular

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Janet Floyd

"Focusing on a series of autobiographical texts published and private, well known and obscure, Writing the Pioneer Woman examines the writing of domestic life on the nineteenth-century North American frontier. In an attempt to determine the meanings found in the pioneer woman's everyday writings - from records of recipes to descriptions of washing floors - Janet Floyd explores domestic details in the autobiographical writing of British and Anglo-American female emigrants.". "Floyd argues that the figure of the pioneer housewife has been a significant one within general cultural debates about the home and the domestic life of women, on both sides of the Atlantic. She looks at the varied ideological work performed by this figure over the last 150 years and at what the pioneer woman signifies and has signified in national cultural debates concerning womanhood and home.". "The autobiographies under discussion are not only of homemaking but also of emigration. Equally, these texts are about the enterprise of emigration, with several of them written to advise prospective emigrants. Using the insights of diaspora and migration theory, Floyd shows that these writings portray a far subtler role for the pioneer woman than is suggested by previous scholars, who often see her either as participating directly in the overall domestication of colonial space or as being strictly marginal to that process."--BOOK JACKET.

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Elinor Burkett

The first female head of state in the Western world and one of the most influential women in modern history, Golda Meir was a member of the tiny coterie of founders of the State of Israel, the architect of its socialist infrastructure, and its most tenacious international defender. Her uncompromising devotion to shaping and defending a Jewish homeland against dogged enemies and skittish allies stunned political contemporaries skeptical about the stamina of an elderly leader, and transformed Middle Eastern politics for decades to follow.A blend of Emma Goldman and Martin Luther King Jr. in the guise of a cookie-serving grandmother, Meir was a tough-as-nails politician who issued the first prescient warnings about the rise of international terrorism, out-maneuvered Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger at their own game of realpolitik, and led Israel through a bloody war even as she eloquently pleaded for peace. A prodigious fundraiser and persuasive international voice, Golda carried the nation through its most perilous hours while she herself battled cancer.In this masterful biography, critically acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Elinor Burkett looks beyond Meir's well-known accomplishments to the complex motivations and ideals, personal victories and disappointments, of her charismatic public persona. Beginning with Meir's childhood in virulently anti-Semitic Russia and her family's subsequent relocation to the United States, Burkett places Meir within the framework of the American immigrant experience, the Holocaust, and the single-mindedness of a generation that carved a nation out of its own nightmares and dreams. She paints a vivid portrait of a legendary woman defined by contradictions: an iron resolve coupled with magnetic charm, an utter ordinariness of appearance matched to extraordinary achievements, a kindly demeanor that disguised a stunning hard-heartedness, and a complete dedication to her country that often overwhelmed her personal relationships.To produce this definitive account of Meir's life, Burkett mined historical records never before examined by any researcher, and interviewed members of Meir's inner circle, many going on record for the first time. The result is an astounding portrait of one of the most commanding political presences of the twentieth century—a woman whose uncompromising commitment to the creation and preservation of a Jewish state fueled and framed the ideological conflicts that still define Middle Eastern relations today.

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Sherry M. Velasco

Isabel de Jesus was a seventeenth-century Carmelite nun who manipulated traditional religious rhetoric in the manner of St. Teresa to express resistance to a misogynistic tradition. Her fascinating autobiography provides a rich source for examining strategies employed by women religious writers. Velasco discusses Isabel's extraordinary ability to articulate the double binds women writers faced, her multiple symbolic uses of nausea and vomiting, and her use of the voice of the Devil as a spokesman for traditional male views. This important in-depth study illustrates how Isabel reshapes symbolic logic in ways that permit her to defend her authority as a writer. Literary scholars will find the discussion of rhetorical strategies and metanarrative discourse engaging as will specialists in religious studies, women's studies, and early modern history.

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Susan Swingler

"Susan Swingler is the stepdaughter of one of Australia's most revered writers - Elizabeth Jolley. Abandoned by her father, Leonard, at the age of four, Susan had no contact with the Jolley family until they found and reclaimed her at the age of 21. Why they were kept apart is the subject of this startling new memoir. The House of Fiction tells the story of Swingler's quest to find her father. As she painstakingly traces clues to a better understanding of Leonard, she inadvertently unravels an intricate fiction created by Elizabeth to protect those she loves. A story that sheds a new and surprising light on one of Australia's most important writers, it is also an intimate and deeply moving memoir of a daughter's quest to discover her absent father"--Publisher's description.