Abstract

This essay examines the work of Louise Clappe (1819–1906), specifically The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Clappe’s Shirley Letters are significant because she uses the epistolary genre in the form of private letters to her sister to reach public audiences, a strategy practiced by few other American pioneer women who have been studied. Furthermore, although her location in the mining camps is extremely limiting in a material and social sense, Clappe creatively details her deprivations to highlight her distinctiveness and ingenuity in adapting to California’s challenging frontier.

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2018-01-02
DOI
10.1080/07350198.2018.1395267
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

References (32) · 4 in this index

  1. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Working with and Working For: Ethos and Power in Women’s Writing
  3. Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical Critical Theory
  4. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice
  5. College English
Show all 32 →
  1. Re: Hello from San Diego!
  2. 1851.” Marysville Herald
  3. The Shirley Letters: From the California Mines, 1851–1852
  4. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900
  5. The Letters of Alexander Hill Everett to Louise Amelia Knapp Smith (‘Dame Shirley’) 1839–…
  6. Boston: James Munroe & Co
  7. Longino. Performing Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence.
  8. Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives, 1839–1987
  9. Holy Bible. Authorized King James Version
  10. The Ethos of Rhetoric
  11. Rhetoric Review
  12. The Turkish Embassy Letters
  13. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  14. 10.2307/3636592
  15. Rhetoric Review
  16. Royce, Josiah.California: From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Stu…
  17. The Printers Foreword to This Edition
  18. Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric
  19. Pacific Historian
  20. Telling Travels: Selected Writing by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad
  21. Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home
  22. Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America
  23. 10.2307/25462581
    California History  
  24. The Shirley Letters: From the California Mines, 1851–1852
  25. The Shirley Letters from the California Mines 1851–1852
  26. The Letters of Alexander Hill Everett to Louise Amelia Knapp Smith (“Dame Shirley”) 1839–1847
  27. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West