Writing Home

A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier; the Letters of Emma Botham Alderson

Emma Botham Alderson and Donald Ingram Ulin (Ed.)

2020
564 pages
$163.00
ISBN 9781684481965

Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker offer unique perspectives on racism, slavery, and abolition; the impending war with Mexico; presidential elections; various religious and utopian movements; and the practices of everyday life in a young country.

Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Editor Donald Ulin discusses the relationship between Alderson's letters and her sister Mary Howitt's Our Cousins in Ohio (1849), a remarkable instance of transatlantic literary collaboration.

Writing Home offers an unparalleled opportunity for studying immigrant correspondence due to Alderson's unusually well-documented literary and religious affiliations. The notes and introductions provide background on nearly all the places, individuals, and events mentioned in the letters.

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Review

"Indeed, the editorial sections are tremendously insightful and valuable. Ulin has completed a lot of research about all manner of aspects of Alderson's life and context...[Writing Home] is a very complete volume in the best possible sense."
- Quaker Studies, 2021

"Bucknell University Press must be highly congratulated for fulfilling so successfully the role of an academic press (no surprise for Bucknell) and not shrinking this volume to a slender market piece. The book contains Ulin's full scholarly apparatus of endnotes, an appendix of the physical and postal attributes of the letters, an appendix of names, a rich bibliography, and a detailed index. Ulin and Bucknell University Press have demonstrated the highest standard of academic publishing. This book is worth every penny and is something to write home about."
- In Pennsylvania History, Summer 2021

"Emma Botham Alderson, author of this important collection of letters, is an unusually articulate, observant, and skilled writer, who brings to life the courage and ingenuity of America's nineteenth-century English settlers. Such records are of special significance in our own time, when many are sadly unappreciative of the hardships and heartbreak of the immigrant experience. Donald Ulin provides a wealth of well-researched material to help us better understand the text and its historical context."
- Paula Feldman, co-editor of The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe

"Emma Botham Alderson, an English Quaker woman setting out on a new life in the United States, was an acute and sensitive observer of life in the Ohio Valley in the 1840s. Her letters to family back in England are filled with observations on everything from landscapes to politics to slavery and antislavery to Quaker peculiarities. We are fortunate that they have survived, and fortunate that they have found such a skilled and thorough editor in Donald Ulin."
-Tom Hamm, editor of Quaker Writings: An Anthology, 1650-1920

About the authors:

Emma Botham Alderson (1806-1847) was a Quaker woman who immigrated to Ohio from Liverpool, England, in 1842, with her husband and other family members. She was the sister of Mary Howitt, popular poet, translator, and author of books for children and young adults.

Donald Ingram Ulin is an associate professor and director of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford in Pennsylvania and has published articles on a wide variety of topics, including literary pedagogy, Charles Darwin, film adaptations of Huckleberry Finn, and the nineteenth-century invention of an English countryside.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

EPUB: $163.00, 9781684481989; PDF: $163.00, 9781684482009