O My America! Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World

British travel writer Wheeler (Terra Incognita) narrates the journeys of six 19th-century Englishwomen whose battles “to be themselves in a man’s world as late middle age loomed” were transformed by their sojourns—and in some instances, immigration—to a burgeoning America: Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and a popular writer herself; Fanny Kemble, an actress turned unhappy slave-plantation wife turned abolitionist; radical social commentator Harriet Martineau; Illinois homesteader Rebecca Burland; invalid Isabella Bird, whose rugged adventures in Colorado put her illnesses into remission; and Jane Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubback, who reinvented herself in Gold Rush–era San Francisco. Wheeler creates vivid portraits of these female adventurers with vastly differing personalities and experiences, but she conveys a depressing lack of feminist awareness, describing postmenopausal years as “frumpy” and “the last gray chapters of female lives,” referring to these brave women as her “girls,” and selecting them as subjects “based on feelings of sympathy and empathic mockery.” She seems shocked that their stories and tenacity “revealed a land as exotic as any youthful Xanadu.” The narrative includes detours into American history and minibiographies of male icons, including Erskine Caldwell, Al Cap, Buffalo Bill Cody, and John Steinbeck. Wheeler’s parallel travelogue distracts enough to seem self-indulgent but is too fragmentary to add much insight. 47 b&w illus. and maps. Agent: Kathy Robbins, Robbins Office. (Sept.)