Alice Cary, as Mary Clemmer Ames records in A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1872), wrote to a friend during the last decade of her life: "I am ashamed of my work. The great bulk of what I have written is poor stuff. Some of it, maybe, indicates ability to do better--that is about all." Despite Cary's deprecating self-evaluation, nineteenth-century readers and critics valued her work. Her first collection of short stories, Clovernook; or, Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West (1852) was popular for more than thirty years, until at least 1884 when a new edition of the collection was published. Critic Edward Eggleston recognized Alice Cary as "the first native of the Ohio Valley who attempted to interpret the region in fiction" and dubbed her "the founder of the tradition of honest interpretation of the West." Indeed, Cary's "honest interpretation" required her readers to face in print the...