Sister Emily as enlightened by Jane Yolen's storytelling.

 Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories

Jane Yolen

Open Road Integrated Media, Pub Date: Jun 18 2013

Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories is a collection of Jane Yolen's short stories. The title story is a "what if" look at Emily Dickinson, a poet from Amherst, Massachusetts. Emily's eye and health issues force her to become a recluse within her family home, venturing out only at night. The story brings excitement and travel to her life through a visit from a being on a lightship. Emily gains personal peace and perspective from her view of the earth from space. This twist of reality explains the life of an otherwise private woman of the Nineteenth Century.

Yolen's short stories in this collection often describe situations in which the characters face moral and social dilemmas. Sometimes the stories resemble fairy tales that often end in reality not “happily ever after”. Readers will gain perspective and understanding from the stories. I read the stories as comments on our society and its past that brought us to our present. Her bold stories express life beyond the magic of fairy tales; humanity relying on life skills, emotions and self-knowledge to persevere. Many times the endings involve ironic twists of fate with the protagonist displaying stoic determination.

I recommend Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories to you to challenge and spark your thinking. As Yolen explores her topics, the author often emerges as narrator/commentator to express a voice that often connects the stories. Jane Yolen is a gifted storyteller and the images drawn in this collection are entertaining and intriguing. 

Read on!

Sue McFadden

Historical Treatment of John Brown's Family: a women's history

Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

Cornell University Press

Pub Date: Aug 6 2013  |  Archive Date: Jul 23 2013

The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown's Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism

This account focuses on the women of John Brown's family, his second wife Mary, daughters and daughters-in-law. Use of letters, newspaper accounts and works by Brown biographers tells a story of a family supporting a husband and father's abolitionist beliefs within a religious context. Brown and his family's antislavery work went beyond nominal support. The family lived for some time in a community of ex-slaves and worked to help escaped slaves find freedom. 

The women in Brown's life worked hard to bear the burdens of belief and to maintain a house and livelihoods. Brown, often absent, relied on other wealthy abolitionists' gifts and funds to continue his work and feed his family. Brown and his family were the arrow point of the abolitionists of the time. Brown took action while others only talked. The story related by Laughlin-Schultz's portrays the Brown women as strong, yet human characters that face tragic national and personal events. All Brown family members alive after the Civil War were forever intwined with the memory and actions of John Brown.

I recommend this book as a look inside the family of a man willing to take on the government and slaveholders to help free the slaves and raise them to a level of equality with their fellow Americans. The account is balanced and explains some of the thinking of the women. The family letters used to illustrate the lives of the Brown women show real life at the edge.