{"id":3862,"date":"2013-03-05T09:13:41","date_gmt":"2013-03-05T09:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3862"},"modified":"2013-03-06T09:09:45","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T09:09:45","slug":"o-my-america-by-sara-wheeler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3862","title":{"rendered":"O My America! By Sara Wheeler"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Second Acts in a New World<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Jonathan Cape 7 March 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

288pp, hardback, \u00a320<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Jessica Mann<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lying about one’s age has become quite unfashionable. These days magazines and newspaper supplements are full of confessional journalism by women in their forties and fifties writing about the miseries of getting older, usually with the naive implication that theirs is the first generation to feel the pain. The writer and traveller Sara Wheeler, approaching her fiftieth birthday in 2011, dreaded the prospect of \u2018the frumpy years stretched out like a downhill catwalk\u2019. She was surprised to find half a dozen role models from the nineteenth century, women who proved that there is life after fertility by reinventing themselves in America, land of new starts. Not that Wheeler\u2019s description of Fanny (mother of Anthony) Trollope at 50 is very encouraging: \u2018Failing eyesight, night sweats, unplanned micturation, forgetfulness, deafness, weight gain, hairy chin and gravity.\u2019 Mercifully, that’s not what 50 looks like nowadays! And if it is what it looked like nearly two hundred years ago, then Fanny\u2019s adventures are all the more impressive. She trekked indefatigably around America for three years, always in the most uncomfortable circumstances. Then she \u2018slunk home with a suitcase of smashed-up dreams and three children incubating tuberculosis,\u2019 wrote Domestic Manners of the Americans<\/em>, and became a popular bestseller.<\/p>\n

\u2018Role models are rare for women contemplating a second act,\u2019 Sara Wheeler says, but she did manage to find half a dozen women who went to America and followed the frontier west until \u2018the rails joined the coast and made a nation.\u2019 Her subjects were very different from each other, but they all fought \u2018to be themselves in a man’s world\u2019 as late middle age loomed.\u00a0 They \u2018spoke to me across the years, voices from what was once the distant shore of middle age, where women cease to exist.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018How do middle-aged women respond when life puts the boot in?\u2019 Wheeler asks, and shows us, by describing the American adventures of the revered social commentator Harriet Martineau, and Fanny Kemble, a heroine from a theatrical dynasty who married a brute of a slave owner-driver. It was he who, in drafting a section of the American Constitution, wrote, \u2018For census purposes a slave is one fifth of a person.\u2019 Then comes Rebecca Burlend, who dictated to her son an account of her immensely hard-working life and the hardship, grind and disappointments of literally breaking new ground; Jane Austen\u2019s niece Catherine Hubback who went off to California, and the one I suspect is the author’s favourite, Isabella Bird, one of those famous Victorian lady travellers who were invalids at home but miraculously energetic and happy once they were overseas and free. Wheeler weaves her own experiences in with those of her subjects, writing, as in all her earlier travel books and biographies, in a sharp, smart, enjoyable style that combines objectivity with candour.<\/p>\n

Women still grow up, as Wheeler herself and all her subjects did, with the entrenched idea that female life is more or less over at 50. From the other side of that milestone I find myself agreeing with a great aunt who told me, when I was too young to believe it, that for women, the 50s are the best decade. That’s not quite the lesson that Sara Wheeler has taken in from her six characters. \u2018Never give up!\u2019 she exhorts her readers, but her conclusion seems more resigned than optimistic. Women should sail into decrepitude with dignity, like Fanny Kemble, carry on washing the milk pans with Harriet’s vigour, explore with Isabella\u2019s \u00e9lan, submit to hard work like Rebecca and salvage joy in daily detail as Catherine did. Above all, be deaf to insults. On the streets of Cincinnati strangers addressed Fanny Trollope as \u2018old woman\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Jessica Mann<\/p>\n

The writer and traveller Sara Wheeler, approaching her fiftieth birthday in 2011, dreaded the prospect of \u2018the frumpy years stretched out like a downhill catwalk\u2019. She was surprised to find half a dozen role models from the nineteenth century, women who proved that there is life after fertility by reinventing themselves in America, land of new starts. Not that Wheeler\u2019s description of Fanny (mother of Anthony) Trollope at 50 is very encouraging: \u2018Failing eyesight, night sweats, unplanned micturation, forgetfulness, deafness, weight gain, hairy chin and gravity.\u2019 Mercifully, that’s not what 50 looks like nowadays![…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3862"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3888,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3862\/revisions\/3888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}