SOURCE: A review of A Victorian Gentlewomen in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, in Western American Literature, 1972, pp. 81-3.

In the following essay, Maguire reviews Rodman W. Paul's edited version of Foote's reminiscences, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.

Most of us hope that the writers of our region can find some way to escape from the burden of all the debased myths of the West created and nurtured in pulp fiction, on T.V., and in the movies. Perhaps unconsciously we fear that the myths might be true, that the early West might have been after all that land of good guys and bad guys, of Injuns and cowboys, of melodrama and bathos which appears every time we turn on the tube. Such fears may explain the considerable attention given recently to Mary Hallock Foote, an early writer of the American West...