Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote by Megan Riley McGilchrist (review)

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• Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote by Megan Riley McGilchrist
• Christie Smith

Megan Riley McGilchrist, Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2021. 224 pp. Paper, $40.

This beautifully written autobiographical text interweaves the life and transformations of western American illustrator and writer Mary Hallock Foote with its author, one of the Western American Literature Association's stalwart members and presenters, Megan Riley McGilchrist. McGilchrist makes the considerable trek almost every year to the WLA conferences from London, England, where she teaches at The American School. McGrilchrist was a girl in the Bay Area and moved to England in her twenties. By contrast, Foote, 1847–1939, was raised in the settled eastern United States but lived in the West for the rest of her adult life. McGilchrist explores the effects of living away from one's birthplace using Foote's life and her own as exemplars. Exile, Nature, and Transformation uses Foote's letters as much as her fiction and art to illustrate her intimate views of life, the West, and society, since as McGilchrist, Melody Graulich, and others have noted, Foote's as yet unpublished letters are her best, most honest, and most intense writings. [End Page 294]

I imagine that this book will appeal to WAL readers, since many will have had similar professional trajectories: relocating after high school to college or graduate school and thence to somewhere(s) else for their teaching careers. Exile, Nature, and Transformation certainly speaks to me because like Foote I came from the East to the West in my twenties, stayed, and have taken decades to make sense of the differences I experience. Full disclosure: in my early thirties, I too was drawn to Foote's life and her stories of exile and reinvention. I wrote the second dissertation on her in the '90s and published a revised version of that in 2009. I too have read Foote's fiction and letters and visited Foote sites east and west and pondered on them.

The focus of this book is none other than the midlife existential question of how we academics might more broadly share what we continue to study after we've written an academic book or two and published the necessary papers in our subject areas. Wanting to write a more accessible meditation on Foote than another learned tome read by only a few, McGilchrist explores how her Foote scholarship has informed and enriched her life and trajectories. She structures the book along the lines of Foote's fascinating biography, from the Quaker childhood along the Hudson River to the diverse sojourns—successful and unsuccessful—in 1870s California; 1870s travel though Morelia, Mexico; 1879–1880 sojourns in Leadville, Colorado; the difficult decade in Boise, Idaho, and its canyons; and finally the Foote family's settling in 1895 in Grass Valley, California, where Foote's mining engineer husband and herself found their "angle of repose" in life and work.

A continual thread in McGilchrist's book is the new natural world that Foote encountered in the West, how it comforted and nurtured her, particularly early on when her distance from eastern culture felt particularly painful. McGilchrist herself appreciates the solace and spiritual connection that the outdoors affords. She explores what nature has meant for Foote and for herself both when they revisit their birth regions and probe their adopted locales for adult significance. As an exile, Foote's work explores both her own and her characters' "life in two places" (qtd. in 63). As McGilchrist notes, "Mary lived her life in the West, quite a lot of that time longing for the East, but in the end recognizing that she had become [End Page 295] part of a new world, and it has become part of her" (17). Exile, Nature, and Transformation is a lovely wander through nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's lives, changes, and personal growth, with the steady, thoughtful McGilchrist at our side.

Christie Smith Colorado Mountain College Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association ...