Synopses & Reviews
With her stunningly realistic and exhaustively researched novels, Cecelia Holland has earned unanimous acclaim as one of the finest historical novelists of our time. Her subjects range from the dawn of prehistory and the turbulent middle ages to the rough-and-tumble pioneer days of her own native California, chronicled in such sweeping epics as The Bear Flag, Pacific Street, and her most recent novel, Railroad Schemes. Now, in An Ordinary Woman, Holland gives us an intimate portrait of a remarkable woman who played a crucial role in the settlement of the West--Nancy Kelsey, the courageous young pioneer who was the first American woman to set foot in California. Drawing upon Nancy's own accounts of her harrowing journey, as well as the writings of those who traveled with her, Cecelia Holland has crafted a stunning biography of this amazing woman that is filled with all of the action, passion, danger, and determination that have made her historical novels bestsellers around the world. Married at the age of fifteen to Ben Kelsey, a restless young Scotch-Irish pioneer who eked out a meager living on the Missouri frontier, Nancy Roberts Kelsey was a strong and capable woman who could milk a cow, skin a deer, make hew own clothes, plant a field, drive a team of oxen, and shoot a rifle. The child pioneers, bred to courage and risk, she had grown up in the wilderness only a few miles from the great Missouri River that was, in 1838, the border of the settled United States. But when the lure of a new life on the farthest edge of the frontier beckoned to Ben Kelsey, Nancy was determined to be at his side. Together they embarked on an arduous odyssey across thousands of miles of uncharted wilderness, crossing the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the High Sierra to reach their promised land. Braving hunger, disaster, illness, betrayal, and death, Nancy Kelsey and her family would play a crucial role in American history, becoming the first wave of a great tide that would transform a nation.
Review
"Holland packs her pages with action and historical detail. She remains in the front rank of the genre, along with Mary Stewart, Dorothy Dunnett, and the late Mary Renault."--
Chicago Sun-TimesIn a field too often associated with paperback potboilers featuring wild-haired damsels with straining bodies, caught in rapturous mid-rape, Cecelia Holland's works are scrupulously researched, and are marked with an almost journalistic reserve and fidelity to the minutiae of everyday life."--The Baltimore Sun
Synopsis
In the spring of 1841, a courageous young woman named Nancy Kelsey set out her husband, Ben, and infant daughter, Martha Ann, from their Missouri homestead on a harrowing track that would lead her into the pages of history. With a small band of pioneers, Nancy and Ben blazed a trail across a wild and unforgiving continent to find a new life in the golden lands of California.
Historical novelist Cecelia Hollnd gives us an intimate portrait of a remarkable woman who played a crucial role in the settlement of the West. Nancy Kelsey was a courageous young pioneer, and the first American woman to set foot in California. drawing upon Nancy's own accounts of her harrowing journey, as well as the writings of those who traveled with her, Holland has crafted a stunning biography of this amazing woman that is filled with all of the action, passion, danger, and determination that have made her novels bestsellers around the world.
About the Author
Cecelia Holland has been writing since she was 12, and spends a good deal of every day writing. She chose to write historical fiction, because, being 12, she had precious few stories of her own, and history seemed to her then, as it still does, an endless fund of material.
She was encouraged to write by the poet William Meredith and the short story writer David Jackson. Her first novel was The Firedrake, and it was published by Atheneum in 1966. Since then, Cecelia has written a lot, read a lot, and raised three daughters. She lived in northern California, in the country. Once a week, she teaches creative writing at Pelican Baystate Prison in Crescent City, and, every day, she takes care of a small menagerie of little animals.