Archives West Finding Aid

Mary Hallock Foote was the author of 12 novels and numerous magazine articles that she illustrated herself. She came to Idaho in 1884, joining her husband Arthur Foote, an engineer who designed irrigation works in the Boise valley. Her works portray the American West from a woman's point of view, though politically she was not always in sympathy with feminist aims, as this letter illustrates. Her reminiscences were published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West by the Huntington Library (California) in 1972; her life story was fictionalized by Wallace Stegner in his novel, Angle of Repose (1971).