STAMFORD, CT - In 1913, two young women left their comfortable homes in upstate New York to teach school in what was the “wilds” of northwestern Colorado. Nearly 100 years later, the granddaughter of one of the women, Dorothy Wickenden, found the teachers’ colorful letters back home and wrote a book based on the correspondence.
Wickenden, the executive editor of The New Yorker, will discuss her book, Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, during a Friends of The Ferguson Library Book & Author Tea Thursday, March 21 at 2 p.m. at The Library’s Harry Bennett Branch, 115 Vine Road, Stamford. Tickets are $25 for members and $30 for non-members.
Wickenden’s grandmother, Dorothy Woodruff, and her friend, Rosamond Underwood, were bored with society luncheons and charity work when they made the bold move to live with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains. They rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards and taught children who arrived at school in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string.
In reconstructing their journey, Wickenden has created an exhilarating saga about two intrepid women and the “settling up” of the West.
A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden is on the faculty of The Writers’ Institute at CUNY’s Graduate Center. She is a former national affairs editor at Newsweek and past executive editor of The New Republic.
For more information or to reserve a seat call 203 351-8275. Advance reservations only.
