Ladies of the Canyons, Lesley PolingKempes
Ladies of the Canyons, Lesley PolingKempes
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Ladies of the Canyons
A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest

Author: Lesley Poling-Kempes

Narrator: Jo Anna Perrin

Unabridged: 11 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/20/2018


Synopsis

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world.

Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them.

Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos.

Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston's Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe's art and literary colony.

Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

About Lesley Poling-Kempes

Lesley Poling-Kempes is the author of many books about the American Southwest, including Bone Horses, winner of the WILLA Literary Award in Contemporary Fiction and the Tony Hillerman Award for Best Fiction. Her nonfiction books include Ghost Ranch, Valley of Shining Stone: The Story of Abiquiu, and The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West. She lives in Abiquiu, New Mexico.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Story Circle Book Reviews on July 12, 2015

I love a writer who teases out the connections from a tangle of sources, a writer whose fascination with her subject shows, who recognizes a deeper truth. And I have found a writer who does all that and then some: Lesley Poling-Kempes. Her most recent work is Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extra......more

Goodreads review by Ameya on June 10, 2016

I didn't expect to love this book as much as I do. I feel like the Title isn't as descriptive as it could be. This is about so much more than what 'adventuring in the southwest' sugests! Poling-Kempes did a fantastic job with taking what seems like an unbelievable amount of source material (all thos......more

Goodreads review by Jaci on February 24, 2016

We're familiar with "Go West, young man, go West" [John Babsone Lane Soule], but this book is about the young women that went West in order to escape cultural strictures at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The American Southwest became the place where they could become women......more

Goodreads review by Cristina on October 21, 2017

The ladies from the PageTurners book club LOVE this book and recommend it regularly, so we finally read it for the group. I love NM history and stories of the badass women who participated in this rough country during the early 1900s. The author made non-fiction palatable and even compelling, althou......more

Goodreads review by Stephanie on August 06, 2021

A friend recommended I read this and I'm so glad I did. Even though it did take me quite a while to read. (Non-fiction almost always takes me a long time.) I learned so much: not only about the biographies of this group of women, but about early 20th-century life in New Mexico in general. At least,......more