I bought and read this book in preparation for moving from San Diego to Norfolk...I wanted to get a flavor of the area. What a pleasant surprise! A fascinating read and one that will make you want to visit the area to see where ESB lived, and where she had such influence in preserving historical Richmond.

Knowing a bona fide eccentric, especially a benevolent one, is simultaneously an entertaining and exasperating experience. Sharing that experience with others is usually daunting. Either the essence of the person being described becomes lost in a jumble of amusing but disjointed anecdotes or eccentricity overwhelms the eccentric, rendering a flat, one-dimensional cartoon in place of a complex, multi-faceted portrait.

In Never Ask Permission, Mary Buford Hitz tackles this daunting task head on, the subject of this memoir being her mother, Elizabeth Scott Bocock or, as she often signed herself, ESB. Rather than take a sequential, "I-am-born" approach, the author chooses to devote separate chapters to different aspects of her mother's personality, each chapter a self-contained essay, overflowing with anecdotes, quotes, and, perhaps most illuminating of all, snippets of ESB's autobiographical sketches. (Most of these autobiographical excerpts, by the way, come from essays ESB wrote during her college years, which began after her sixty-seventh birthday.) Just as a puzzle becomes a picture as each piece falls into place, so does ESB's complex character come into focus, chapter by chapter, with a poignant, but essential clue to this charming, but undeniably complex Virginian saved until the very end.

Many CEO's could learn from ESB's capacity to set goals and achieve them. As ESB emerges from the pages of this lovingly crafted book, the reader meets a determined and creative thinker who probably would not have been impressed with "left-brain/right-brain, lateral thinking, creative problem-solving, if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem" lingo, but who embodied the positive persona such jargon seeks to describe. With one foot firmly planted in late Victorian America and the other constantly, restlessly forcing her into the future, she was a visionary with an astonishing ability to get things done.

If you enjoy biography, if you are fascinated by Virginia, if you want some side-splitting laughs, or if you are just interested in a good read, this is the book for you.

If the moral of Never ask permission lies in the title, I will jump to the front of the line to praise it. The narrative careens around corners and bounces over bumps so merrily that the reader has only fleeting moments to enjoy the insiights and hoot at the comedy while holding on tightly to that pale yellow tailgate.

This biography has an advantage over all other biographies of Addams: it was written not too long after her death by a family member that knew her well. Furthermore, Weber Linn was an English scholar, so his writing style is very refined and easy to read. Despite its complete lack of citations, the author is very objective to the subject at hand. The end result is a very intimate portrait of one (if not the) most amazing woman in American History. Some of the larger aspects of her life included: forming the Women's League for Peace in WWI, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, setting off the Settlement house movement in United States, and being blacklisted by the House for Un-American Activities (yes, she was that cool!). The greatness of Jane Addams is to be found in the details, however, and this book provides the reader with just that. An amazing life, well told.

In this book, Anne Firor Scott takes an in-depth look at the Woman Suffrage movement in the South. Scott is the first historian to write extensively on the subject of woman suffrage in the South. Later historians either agree or disagree with her work. This book is one of her best works. She gives the reader a good understanding of why woman suffrage was not so widely embraced by southern women. Her study looks at women's lives in the South before and after the Civil War. She explains the hardships and responsibilities of antebellum women, and the deprivations these women faced after the fall of the Confederacy. YOU CANNOT STUDY WOMAN SUFFRAGE IN THE SOUTH WITHOUT READING THIS BOOK! It is a classic work, and I highly recommend it!

Ellen Glasgow deserves to be better known. This book, Vein of Iron, is a story of epic scope, covering a period from turn of the century rural Virginia through the Great Depression. The story centers around John Fincastle, a Presbreterian minister defrocked for wrong views who turns philosopher, and his daughter Ada.

The story is melodramatic and awkward at parts, but ultimately it is riveting. As an adolescent, Ada is in love with a young man, Ralph, but loses him to a rich, selfish girl, Janet, who claims Ralph got her pregnant. Janet and Ralph divorce, and Ada and Ralph marry following World War I (and following a torrid two day affair in the woods which is overly-romantically described to this reader, possibly purposefully so). Ralph is disillusioned after the War and the family (Ralph, Ada, their son, John, and an aunt) struggle on through the bubble of prosperity following the War and through the Depression. The scenes of the Depression are wonderfully written.

The theme of the book is the search for happiness and how it is looked for in the wrong places through materialism, superficiality, and the quest for popular approval. There is a strong spiritual, religious theme throughout the book, particularly as it involves the life of John Fincastle.

People look for happiness but don't know how to find it within themselves. Ada perseveres through trouble in her marriage and realizes a subdued but important vision of inner peace. The line "May all beings be free from suffering" is repeated several times during the last section of the book. It is quoted by John Fincastle and is perhaps the moral of the book. The phrase (which is not clearly attributed) is derived from the basic lovinkindness meditation of Buddhism -- a fact John Fincastle (who shows in the book his familarity with Buddhism) would have known. Interesting to see a reflection of the Buddhist tradition in what for me was an unexpected source.

This is a powerful, thoughtful book entitled to its place in American literature.

Ellen Glasgow is definitely an underrated American female writer; how many have heard of her? She writes elegantly and truthfully. The setting for Vein of Iron is an area of rural Virginia where I spent much of my childhood. I don't think it has changed much! In this novel, there are wonderful passages about the impact of Christian beliefs on the life of the people who settled in the region (which can surely be generalized to many rural settlements throughout the U.S.). Glasgow creates a fascinating character in Ada's father, who struggles with his spirituality. Ada is strong, faithful, optimistic- just as I imagined our female predecessors to be at that time. This is a character-driven, setting-driven novel, and I loved it. My daughter surprised me with it for mother's day. Thanks, daughter!

(...)Vein of Iron, written in 1935, is the saga of a Virginia family who live through changing times. It starts in 1901 when the central character Ada is 10 years old, and she is deeply disappointed when, even though she has saved up her money for a doll with real hair, she has to settle for a cheaper doll that she doesn't want. This sets the tone of the book, which is filled with the realities of life's struggles and disappointments. It also deeply explores religion and faith as Ada's father is a former Presbyterian minister who has lost his faith and there is constant conflict between right and wrong as well as tradition and change.

The title refers to the vein of iron within the characters, especially the women, which keeps them going throughout adversity as they struggle through their personal challenges as well as the social changes creating upheaval around them. The love of Ada's life, Ralph McBride, is stolen by the trickery of a supposed best friend. He eventually does come back to her as a soldier off to fight in the World War and their two-day illicit romance results in a pregnancy, which alienates her from her beloved Grandmother. Later, after her lover comes back from war, disillusioned by his experiences on the battlefield, their marriage is marked with more disappointment and struggle as they leave their beloved mountain home and move to a large town. When the Depression hits, and her husband loses his job, she finds work selling gloves in a shop where her wages keep getting reduced and the family struggles to put food on the table. There's always compassion though for those even less fortunate and we get to know their small community of neighbors.

There were a lot of themes going on at once in spite of the simplicity of the words. Yet the story itself was so engaging that I was reading it on the bus one day and went two stops past my usual stop. The sense of place is dominant throughout and I was transported into the author's world. It was not always a pleasant place to be, especially during those Depression years, but I totally related to it all, and admire the "vein of iron" in the author, as well as in her characters. Recommended.

This book is a great resource for anyone doing research on Latter-day Saint women or for anyone simply interested in learning about women and frontier life. All of the articles are insightful and discuss topics that might not be found in the standard history of the LDS church such as mysticism and feminism. There is also extensive writing on polygamy and the effects it had on women in the Church.