O My America! Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World

British biographer and travel writer Wheeler (The Magnetic North) turns her attention to six Englishwomen—Fanny Trollope, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird, Catherine Hubback, and Rebecca Burlend—who reinvented themselves in America during their "second acts" in middle age. They came from a variety of backgrounds—they were, respectively, an author, an actress, an early sociologist, an explorer, Jane Austen's niece, and a tenant farmer—but all wrote extensively in letters, diaries, pamphlets, and books. Some published about their time in the States, including experiences of society balls in the East, Midwestern farms, the Colorado Rockies, and the California gold rush, though not all were impressed with what they found in the New World. Trollope penned a criticism of American manners and Kemble a scathing indictment of Southern slavery, while Martineau praised the country's democratic society and Bird its beautiful geography.