Marietta HolleyCritiques

This lovely book was written about a topic dear to my heart - St. Louis, Missouri. It was quaint and fascinating at the same time, As Holley wrote from the narrator’s point of view in the narrator’s vernacular. Samantha is a woman from a small mid-western town in 1904, and her speech is full of colloquialisms and “country” feeling. It felt as if I had a real glimpse of that time and of that fair. Many parts of Samantha’s descriptions were long lists of the amazing sights and details of the fair. It truly must have been a magnificent display.

It saddens me to see that Marietta Holley's books have lost popularity today, though in her time she was quite the famous writer. I started reading this book after I catalogued it for LT -- I kept reading brief snippets that made me laugh out loud. She gets a bit preachy at time, but is without doubt a brilliant writer. The character which she assumes is an uneducated woman, but Holley is the opposite. Her word play is ingenious and invigorates stuffy English (ex: "...all Mr. Abraham had to do wuz to gird up his lions. This is what it sez. And I don't believe it would take much time to gird up a few lions, it don't seem to me as if it would." AND "It wuz a fair seen, seen for a moment..."). In addition, she is fabulously feminist in a time when women still had little power. Her brief discourse on the torture of the corset was a delight, and her interactions with her husband (another rather amusing character, though in a different vein from Samantha) prove her capability and intelligence. I'm looking forward to reading several more of Holley's books.