“I Am Making the World My Confessor”: Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte

McAnnis does in fact remember her, from a trip to the Blakes’ apartment in the city, during college, but she was just a kid then, with the full horror show: braces, acne, awkwardness. But now she is an altogether different creature…and you think, as you read the passage that follows, of how all novelistic descriptions are essentially exercises in v

The question still unsettles me when I later drive into town to pick up supplies. Who is asking for directions to my farm? The query could be perfectly innocent, asked by someone in search of the previous owner, unaware that the woman passed away three years ago at age eighty-eight. She was, by all accounts, legendary for her sharp wit and her bad

The originality of Mary’s stance is that it gave women entry into the hallowed hallways of literature, precisely because they had not received a classical education. Women’s lack of book learning, far from being a disadvantage, freed them to be closer to Nature.