In 1893, a literary critic in the "Galveston Daily News" lamented that the many women writers in the state, "women of noble talents," had largely gone unnoticed by the literary industry. Her lament has reverberated throughout the past century, as women's letters in Texas have been further marginalized by the male canonmakers who paid tribute to the Texas Mystique--oil derricks, cowboys, and the Alamo: masculine western icons that shaped a region's literature.
"Texas"" Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own" is a sweeping account of a rich yet largely ignored literary history covering...

Quincie, the motherless thirteen-year-old daughter of an itinerant muleskinner, is the captivating protagonist of this Depression-era novel set in the Texas oil patch. Her story s value resides not only in the viewpoint of a young girl who comes of age in the shadow of the derricks but also in the currency of her creator s sensitivity to the natural world and environmental issues.Originally a 1941 Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship Book, Quincie Bolliver is an extraordinary study in character, place, and the community of women weak and strong. From the moment the wise, lonesome Quincie and...

Reared in isolation by her father on the Western prairie, Mary Dove has been taught to fear only one thing. One sparkling October day it happens. The inevitable stranger rides in off the plains, and Mary Dove does what she had always promised her father she would she shoots.Yet compassion overcomes Mary's fear. In remorse, she tends to the wounded stranger, and what follows is their tentative discovery of each other and a love story that weaves universal and timeless themes.The mother who died before Mary Dove could know her was African-American. And so completely has Mary Dove's father...

"Stories about family, legacy, marriage, divorce, religion, all of them played out in relentless weather and under an all-encompassing sky. . . . These female writers come from a storied place most often described from the perspective of the men credited with shaping it. . . . This collection adds insightful dimension to a surprisingly inspiring place." Fort Worth Star-Telegram"A moving and engaging collection of short stories often set in demanding rural conditions. . . . We learn how the seemingly blank, barren expanse that is West Texas is really a landscape of sublime and subtle opulence....

"Stories about family, legacy, marriage, divorce, religion, all of them played out in relentless weather and under an all-encompassing sky. . . . These female writers come from a storied place most often described from the perspective of the men credited with shaping it. . . . This collection adds insightful dimension to a surprisingly inspiring place." Fort Worth Star-Telegram"A moving and engaging collection of short stories often set in demanding rural conditions. . . . We learn how the seemingly blank, barren expanse that is West Texas is really a landscape of sublime and subtle opulence....

Jane Gilmore Rushing grew up in Pyron, a Texas town no longer in existence, and from childhood she knew that she would be a writer. In seven novels produced between 1963 and 1984, she built her stories around themes that few West Texas writers had dared to tackle. Much of her work centers on cotton farms and early ranches in a land she calls the too-late frontier. Those not familiar with her novels might find it surprising that Rushing s plots explore such sensitive topics as an affair between a mulatto girl and a West Texas cowboy, or the painful recognition in an early-nineteenth-century...

These stories, running the gamut of human relationships, the colorful panorama of Texas settings, and a bountiful catalog of unique characters, are evaluated and interpreted by women who each has her own special connection with the state and her own private ringside seat for viewing the tragicomedy we call human experience. Topics, all written by women, include place affecting attitude, feisty women challenging traditional roles, masculine points of view, the sensibilities of children, the gap in understanding between grandparent and grandchild, the tenuous nature of ties between men and...

"Fig newtons" of the imagination and of memory abound in this marvelous collection of twenty-two stories by Texas women. "Fig newtons" such as the magical moment when a dying grandmother teaches Sue Ellen to dance, the red shoes Tammy the Tupperware Princess dons in New Orleans, the yellow thread needed to put Sue Tidwell's quilt together, or weekends of escape and sisterhood spent in El Paso's McCoy Hotel.
The stories chosen here--and introduced and placed in their historical and literary context by editors Sylvia Ann Grider and Lou Halsell Rodenberger--together weave a story of their...

"Fig newtons" of the imagination and of memory abound in this marvelous collection of twenty-two stories by Texas women. "Fig newtons" such as the magical moment when a dying grandmother teaches Sue Ellen to dance, the red shoes Tammy the Tupperware Princess dons in New Orleans, the yellow thread needed to put Sue Tidwell's quilt together, or weekends of escape and sisterhood spent in El Paso's McCoy Hotel.
The stories chosen here--and introduced and placed in their historical and literary context by editors Sylvia Ann Grider and Lou Halsell Rodenberger--together weave a story of their...