The Prairie Wife by Arthur Stringer

Description

The Prairie Wife opens in the voice of a woman who has just done something reckless — married a man she barely knows and followed him to a Montana ranch — and who has nowhere to talk about it but paper. “Splash!… That’s me, Matilda Anne! That’s me falling plump into the pool of matrimony before I’ve had time to fall in love!” The device is the epistolary novel, and Arthur Stringer gives it his liveliest, most confiding heroine, pouring out her letters to a friend six thousand miles away as her new life on the prairie closes around her.

Written in 1919 by the Canadian novelist and poet Arthur Stringer — best known for his popular fiction of the West — the book follows the young bride from the first caravan of trunks and housekeeping chaos to the slow, wintry education of the plains: the seasons, the neighbors, the isolation, and the man she married, whose qualities reveal themselves at the speed of prairie weather. The letters carry the reader inside a marriage being discovered in real time, with all its comedy, hardship, and shocks of tenderness.

Stringer writes the prairie with the exactness of a resident — the light, the distances, the loneliness, the fierce communal warmth of the scattered homesteads. Beneath its bright surface, The Prairie Wife is a serious study of how love is not arrived at but built, season by stubborn season.

Why readers pick it up

• An intimate, epistolary voice that makes the story feel lived as you read.
• Vivid prairie landscape and honest homestead life, drawn by a poet.
• A marriage story told from the inside, with wit and real depth.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition presents the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader.