Writing Home

"The letters are a wonderful window into Alderson's experiences...The editorial sections are tremendously insightful and valuable. Ulin has completed a lot of research about all manner of aspects of Alderson's life and context."— Quaker Studies
"Emma Botham Alderson, author of this important collection of letters, is an unusually articulate, observant, and skilled writer, who brings to life the courage and ingenuity of America's nineteenth-century English settlers. Such records are of special significance in our own time, when many are sadly unappreciative of the hardships and heartbreak of the immigrant experience. Donald Ulin provides a wealth of well-researched material to help us better understand the text and its historical context."— Paula Feldman, co-editor of The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe
"Emma Botham Alderson, an English Quaker woman setting out on a new life in the United States, was an acute and sensitive observer of life in the Ohio Valley in the 1840s. Her letters to family back in England are filled with observations on everything from landscapes to politics to slavery and antislavery to Quaker peculiarities. We are fortunate that they have survived, and fortunate that they have found such a skilled and thorough editor in Donald Ulin."— Tom Hamm, editor of Quaker Writings: An Anthology, 1650-1920
"Bucknell University Press must be highly congratulated for fulfilling so successfully the role of an academic press (no surprise for Bucknell) and not shrinking this volume to a slender market piece. The book contains Ulin's full scholarly apparatus of endnotes, an appendix of the physical and postal attributes of the letters, an appendix of names, a rich bibliography, and a detailed index. Ulin and Bucknell University Press have demonstrated the highest standard of academic publishing. This book is worth every penny and is something to write home about."— Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies