To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West,
Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's
writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American
frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled
Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more
modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and
cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny's study of frontier
mythology begun in
The Lay of the Land.