Description:
"This Is the Life" paints a vivid picture of the life and times of Jennie McLeod, a 20th-century college girl from the mill town of Clinton, Massachusetts. Author Leslie Perrin Wilson presents Jennie and her world through careful research, contextual narrative, and a richly annotated transcription of her 1914-1918 diary. Jennie's distinctive personality, her family, friends, studies, and aspirations, along with the presence of larger events in the background--world war and woman's suffrage, in particular--all come to life on the pages of this book.
Brief description: Leslie Perrin Wilson is a writer on local history for both scholarly and general audiences. A retired special collections curator, she is enthusiastic about primary documentation, particularly the diaries, letters, and narratives that tell the stories of women's lives. She and her husband live in Clinton, Massachusetts, in the house Jennie McLeod occupied for half a century.
Review Quotes:
"We must give thanks for the stroke of good fortune that brought Jennie McLeod's five-year daily diary into the hands of historian Leslie Wilson
just under one hundred years after Jennie penned her last entry. A master researcher and natural storyteller, Wilson gives us in rich introductory chapters both the granular texture and big-picture context of the young diarist's life as she grows from Smith College junior to fledgling career woman in the bustling manufacturing town of Clinton, Massachusetts. Then, of course, Jennie tells her own story with refreshing honesty and verve in the spirited jottings of a good friend, loyal sister and daughter, middling student, enthusiastic theatergoer, and all-around life-lover whose command of the whimsical, peppery vernacular of her day makes for enchanting reading."
Megan Marshall
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,
Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, and The Peabody Sisters: Three Sisters
Who Ignited American Romanticism