Caroline Kirkland (12 January 1801-6 April 1864), a mid-nineteenth-century New York literary woman of quite comprehensive abilities and ambitions, is known today primarily for three early works that illuminate a distinct phase of the American Westering movement. A New Home--Who'll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839) is the first and by far the best of these, and established her reputation as an energetic and opinionated exponent of the woman's (and wife's) view of an epoch whose delineation was almost exclusively the preserve of male writers. Only Margaret Fuller (Summer on the Lakes, in 1843) and the Canadians Susanna Moodie (Roughing it in the Bush ) and Catharine Parr Traill (The Backwoods of Canada) mark down such clear-eyed perceptions of the distaff response to frontier life.

Born Caroline Matilda Stansbury in New York City, she received her education there and in 1828 married William Kirkland, a teacher and missionary. The first years of her...