Under the Gables

Illustration by Shirley Fields I recently read two Persephone books back to back that portrayed mothers in England in the years betwe...

George Washington with the Marquis de Lafayette (center) and Lt. Col. Tench Tilghman, Washington's aide-de-camp, at Yorktown, by Char...

It won't take you but an evening to read Lillian Smith's Memory of a Large Christmas , but it will be a memorable one. A writer of...

I am happy to report that this book lived up to its cover, which is a relief  since that's why I bought it last February, and then I ...

The first moment of any art is the impulse to produce something. Berthe Morisot Painting by Paul Gobillard  On the part of the consu...

In Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood , author Steven Mintz reports that the kinds of blended families we see today were comm...

  Before I read The Able McLaughlins , I never knew the tremendous efforts of women who pioneered the west to bring with them precious ...

  The Iowa prairie as it might have looked when the Able McLaughlins farmed it in the mid-19th century. Margaret Wilson won the 1924 ...

I bought this book for its cover: Christmas Stories , Everyman's Library.  Happy though that it begins  with Charles Dickens.

Calm Morning by Frank Weston Benson, 1904 This book published by Persephone Post (No. 67) is a snapshot taken of a family on their annu...

Golden Afternoon by Thomas George Sotter, 1935 Recently a friend asked me which country I would most like to visit and I answered Monta...

Nancy Hale The Pattern of Perfection by Nancy Hale (1908-1988), a collection of thirteen short stories, definitely falls into that genr...

Zora Neale Hurston: a great lady . Two Florida writers, bent on translating their Florida environs for the outside world--Zora Neale Hur...

New England Interior by Edmund Charles Tarbell, 1906. I wonder if the interior that is the actual subject of this painting is the private...

Pioneer ladies before a sod house on the Great Plains. In her O Pioneers! Willa Cather captured the efforts to create real homes of ...

The farmyard by Beatrix Potter for The Tale of Mrs. Jemima Puddle-Duck One last animal story from Mrs. Grant from the days when she was a ...

For you, Gab. In her memoirs Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant records two stories about elephants, and here they are. The Tale of Mr. and Mrs. Elephan...

Monument to Mrs. Julia Dent Grant in Galena, Illinois. This statue of Julia Dent Grant, I believe, shows the vitality of the beloved wife of...

A wagon train wends its way west along the Santa Fe Trail. In 1928 the American author Conrad Richter and his family pulled up stakes and mo...

In Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding , on the night before the wedding, all the family has gathered at the Fairchild house for a family celeb...