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Show continued from front flap Saints. Her private diary, started when she was fourteen, furnishes evidence that she was not only an honest and informative observer of local, national, and interpational events, but was haunted by the feeling th.at her call to wifehood, motherhood, and church and community activity deprived her of full expression of her literary talent. She found a substitute in teaching literature and religion in church and in community. Did the joys of wifehood, motherhood, and sisterhood counterbalance her yearning for literary fulfillment? The biographer must wrestle with tensions which reveal themselves in her diary. As late as September, 1960, when fifty-nine year-old Madelyn sent off Brian, her fourth and last child, to Harvard University, she experienced, as she wrote, "a time of reckoning, a dramatic resolution of the problems of my life." She foresaw a torrent of productivity. But it was not to be. During the next few months Madelyn's health failed, and within a year of her "time of reckoning" she was dead. Nevertheless, her influence continues. Her captivating diary, meaningful poems, and stories and plays demonstrate how effectively she was able to convey subtlety, beauty, intellect, and divine musing; it gave her wings and wit. LEONARD J. ARRINGTON is Lemuel Redd Professor of Western History Emeritus at Brigham Young University. He has served as LDS Church Historian, director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, and director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History at BYU. A former professor of economics at Utah State University, he has also taught at North Carolina State, UCLA, the university system of Italy, and BYU. He is also author of some two dozen books on Mormon, Utah, and Western History. They include biographies of Brigham Young, Charles C. Rich, David Eccles, Harold F. Silver and the prizewinning Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints. |
