A Home-Concealed Woman: The Diaries of Magnolia Wynn Le Guin, 1901-1913 [Paperback]

Magnolia Wynn Le Guin (Author)
MAGNOLIA WYNN LE GUIN (1869–1947) was born in High Falls, Georgia (Monroe County). Her family moved to Wynn's Mill, Georgia (Henry County) when she was three years old, and she lived there the rest of her life.

Charles A. Le Guin (Editor)
CHARLES A. LE GUIN is a grandson of Magnolia Wynn Le Guin, whose diaries are collected in A Home-Concealed Woman (Georgia). A professor of history at Portland State University, Le Guin is the author of Roland de la Platiere: A Public Servant in the Eighteenth Century.

The world of Magnolia Le Guin, like that of countless farm women, was defined by and confined to home and family. Born in 1869 into the rural, white, agrarian society of Georgia's central piedmont, she raised eight children virtually on her own, yet never in her life ventured farther than thirty miles from her birthplace. Her situation, however extreme, was not unique in her day. What distinguished Le Guin was her love of writing, her need to write about being a wife and mother—despite a daunting workload and burden of responsibilities that left her with little free time or energy.

In a plain, idiomatic style, these diaries detail some of the most trying, but nonetheless fulfilling, years of her life. At the same time, A Home-Concealed Woman (her own self-descriptive phrase) provides a firsthand view of the hardships of subsistence farming, the material culture of rural society, and the codes to which Le Guin as a white woman, a southerner, and an evangelical Christian adhered.

The most striking feature of Le Guin's world is that it was confined almost entirely to the indoors, from the bedrooms where her children were born and where her parents lay ill and died to the stove room where the daily meals were cookedlCä