Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California

JoAnn Levy; Foreword by Kevin Starr

JoAnn Levy has pieced together for the first time the grand story of two of American history's forgotten treasures: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby. Together they made national headlines with their writings and their beliefs, including abolitionism, women's suffrage, spiritualism, and phrenology. Both were extraordinarily gifted authors, and Levy has extensively mined their writings, and found gold. These women were at the vanguard of the major social and political movements of their time; they invented identities for themselves that the world had never seen before.

Reviews

"Unsettling the West is a compelling, eminently readable portrait of two remarkable women..."—San Francisco Chronicle

"JoAnn Levy's dual biography of two audacious leaders (till now unheralded) who helped find the way to suffrage and other longed-for rights is an inspiration. What a revelation, what an achievement!"—J. S. Holliday, author of Rush for Riches

"Thanks to JoAnn Levy, the lives of these two pioneer reformers—so inextricably bound up with each other through the lifetime gift of friendship—stand revealed as important chapters in the story of nineteenth-century American women."—Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California

About the Author

JoAnn Levy is the author of They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush; Daughter of Joy: A Novel of Gold Rush San Francisco (winner of the 1999 Women Writing the West WILLA Literary Award for Best Historical Fiction); and For California’s Gold (winner of the 2001 WILLA Award for Best Historical Fiction).