Old friends and new acquaintances alike will welcome this book combining Stewart's previously unpublished or uncollected letters with Susanne K. George's extensive research. Here is as full and candid a portrait as wella re ever likely to have of The Woman Homesteader: the illness, disappointments, and grinding hard work that lay behind her genial public persona; the family, neighbors, and correspondents who peopled her letter-stories and shared her life.

George has discovered in Elinore Pruitt Stewart a story fully as rewarding as any told by the Woman Homesteader herself. In an afterword George considers Stewart's use of fictional devices and her growth as a writer as well as her place in American letters.