Starting with her nostalgically remembered childhood on a Quaker farm on the Hudson River, Mary Hallock Foote tells the story of her training as an artist in the 1860s and of her marriage to a mining engineer whose jobs took the young couple west in the closing days of the frontier. She left the east, but not her career in book illustration. While moving from place to place with her husband, she also became a popular and widely published author, describing in her novels what it meant to be a woman in the American West during the late nineteenth century. Her story inspired the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner.

Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) was a highly successful writer and illustrator of stories and novels about the West.

"Rodman W. Paul's superb edition of Mrs. Foote's reminiscences makes clear the reason that this woman and her work suddenly seem important subjects for consideration. . . . A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West should give us a more complete sense of our heritage."—Western American Literature

"Mrs. Foote's ability to capture, vividly and freshly, the tenor and detail of life in the virtually undescribed regions during this formulative period make this book highly valuable and entertaining. . . . The narrative is enhanced by the vigor of Mrs. Foote's style as she relates one woman's adjustments and adaptations, one woman's admirable attempt to cultivate the best values of the East and the West in an era when such fusion was seldom attempted—or possible. The book, well edited and footnoted, is heightened in value by the profusion of Mrs. Foote's own excellent illustrations."—Utah Historical Quarterly

"A unique portrayal of the feelings of a Victorian woman: the tensions of her personal life as a wife and mother; her relationships with other women. . . . Such reminiscences provide the research sources for the innovative and imaginative history of American women being written today."—California Historical Quarterly

"Rodman Paul demonstrates a rare sensitivity, even compassion, for this talented woman and those she loved, destined to live a life of frustration but still able to absorb great sustaining power from occasional triumphs."—The Historical Society of Southern California