Truthful Woman in Southern California, A.
Sanborn, Kate. A Truthful Woman in Southern California. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1906.
8vo.; illustrated; offsetting to preliminaries and to pages facing tipped-in photographs; yellow cloth pictorially stamped in green, red, and gilt; spine browned.
First edition of this travelogue, “extra-illustrated” with maps, photographs, and postcards affixed to several pages. The New York Herald Review excerpt facing the title page calls Sanborn “certainly a very bright writer,” and notes that “when a book bears her name it is safe to buy it and put it aside for delectation when a leisure hour comes along. This bit of a volume is enticing in every page, and the weather seemed not to be so intolerably hot while we were reading it.” Among the highlights of Sanborn’s journey are Coronado Beach, San Diego, Los Angeles and its environs, Mount Wilson, Riverside, and Santa Barbara.
Brought up in Hanover, N.H. by her father, a Dartmouth Latin professor, and her mother, a niece of Daniel Webster, Kate Sanborn (1839-1917) had little formal training but was well-educated through exposure to a vast amount of literature and to her parents’ friends and colleagues. Elizabeth Deering Hanscom notes that “[s]he was almost inevitably a writer and teacher, beginning to publish at the age of eleven and opening a school in her father’s house before she was twenty. From 1859 to 1863, during her father’s years in St. Louis, she taught girls in Mary Institute, connected with Washington University. Later she taught elocution at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn” (DAB XV-XVI, p. 327), and from 1880-83 she taught English literature at Smith College. Sanborn devoted the balance of her career to lecturing in less formal environments nationwide, and to writing humorous and insightful articles for magazines and four books:
The records of her experiences Adopting an Abandoned Farm (1891) and Abandoning an Adopted Farm (1894) are delightfully humorous and may be counted as among the early contributions to “back to the land” writings. Lightly as she wrote them, the experiences were not all easy or remunerative, and the wise may read many a warning and much sage advice under the flow of wit. This is true also of her A Truthful Woman in Southern California (1893). Her last serious work, Memories and Anecdotes (1915), written too late to show her qualities at their best, abounds in clever turns and apt quotations and exhibits many of her chief characteristics, her redundancy, her lack of continuity, her wide and delighted reading, her love of people, and her unfailing zest in life. (ibid.)
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