Synopses & Reviews
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.
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
An Ordinary Woman is an epic journey, a tale of high courage in the face of harrowing danger and privation. In 1841 Nancy Kelsey followed her husband across the continent, with a baby in her arms; into the Bear Flag Rebellion where the American settlers won California from Mexico under a flag made from her petticoats; to Texas where they ranched cattle; and back again to California.
Holland's research included contemporary documents, government archives, journals and newspapers, and the private letters and memoirs of Nancy Kelsey herself, the people who traveled with her, and her descendents. Holland's powerful, dramatic prose sets the scene and reveals the heart of this courageous American pioneer
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.