Born Emily Bradley on 13 September 1827, the writer who later become known as Clara Cushman, Alice G. Lee, "Cousin Alice," Alice B. Neal, and Alice B. Haven lived a mosaic life as inventive and self-examining as her pseudonyms suggest. What often in the thirty-five years of her life proved to be a manifold, if not divided, existence can be traced back to her third birthday. When Emily's father, George Bradley, died on 13 September 1830, he left his three-year-old daughter the legacy of his temperament without the affirmations of his example. This temperament--which was proud, ambitious, and resolutely secular--was frequently at odds with the pious and unworldly temperament bestowed by his widow, Sarah Brown Bradley. Emily, therefore, was destined from the time of her father's death to struggle within the context of her maternal family against her father's spirit of brash confidence--a struggle that later came to fruition in school, marriage...