Magnolia Wynn Le Guin (Author)
MAGNOLIA WYNN LE GUIN (1869–1947) was born in High Falls, Georgia
(Monroe County). Her family moved to Wynn's Mill, Georgia (Henry
County) when she was three years old, and she lived there the rest
of her life.
Charles A. Le Guin (Editor)
CHARLES A. LE GUIN is a grandson of Magnolia Wynn Le Guin, whose
diaries are collected in A Home-Concealed Woman (Georgia). A
professor of history at Portland State University, Le Guin is the
author of Roland de la Platiere: A Public Servant in the Eighteenth
Century.
Here is a record of the inner life of the Georgia farmwife, written
in the margins of her husband's account books and on scraps of
paper. With a deliberate repetition that mirrors the tedium of one
decade, Le Guin tells of difficult childbirths, gnawing fears of
illness in the members of her ever-increasing family, the toil
required to feed and clothe the brood, the stream of company that
taxed her precarious health. Hers was the typical lot of the
agrarian poor, but because she needed to 'scribble' as others
needed to breathe, Le Guin has left behind an inspiring account of
her ability to survive not only with fortitude but with
dignity.
The diaries' ability to convey the ways a woman accommodated
herself to the inescapable facts of pregnancy, childhood illness,
death, and domestic duties can offer the scholarly reader a
much-needed point of entry into the commonplace where most women
have lived and many are living now. . . . In juxtaposing the old
lot of woman with the new demands for psychological insight,
Magnolia Le Guin's diaries suggest that intellectual and emotional
complexity could shape the experience of even the most apparently
traditional life . . . Scholars in search of such insights into
daily life can find them in the skillfully edited pages of Magnolia
Le Guin's diaries.
Instead of a home-concealed woman, these pages disclose a
home-revealed woman, whose writings chronicle the evolution of
emotional intricacies and spiritual values in a now vanished world.
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