Olson begins with an in-depth look at St. Joseph, Missouri, the place where Owen lived most of her life. He explores the role that her grandparents and parents had in transforming the small trading village into one of the American West’s most exciting boomtowns. He also examines the family’s position of affluence and the effect that the devastation of the Civil War had on their family life and their standing within the community. He describes the interaction of Owen with her two younger sisters, both of whom had interesting and, for women of the time, unconventional careers.

Olson analyzes many of the nineteenth-century theories, stereotypes, and popular beliefs that influenced the work of Owen and many of her peers. By taking a cross-disciplinary look at her works of fiction, poetry, folklore, history, and anthropology, this volume sheds new light on elements of Owen’s career that have not previously been discussed in print. Examples of the romance stories that Owen wrote for popular magazines in the 1880’s are identified and examined in the context of the time in which Owen wrote them.

This groundbreaking biography shows that Owen was more than just a folklorist—she was a nineteenth-century woman of many contradictions. She was an independent woman of many interests who possessed a keen intellect and a genuine interest in people and their stories. Specialists in folklore, anthropology, women’s studies, local and regional history, and Missouriana will find much to like in this thoroughly researched study.

“Greg Olson has given Americanists a unique biographical portrait of one of the first and most famous women folklorists, Mary Alicia Owen (1850-1935). An archivist at the Missouri State Archives, Olson clearly is a regionalist at heart, sensitive to the state’s continuing appreciation of Owen’s contributions as a strong-willed, intellectually inquisitive writer who lived her entire adult life in a St. Joseph home shared with her similarly unmarried sisters, equally devoted to artistic and scientific endeavors. However, Olson also illuminates the wider context of Owen’s life as a Vassar-educated, southern woman of the Gilded Age, raised in a slave-holding family and still racist in her sentiments, yet committed to producing literary representations of the multiethnic borderlands of early Missouri for the world.”—American Studies

“The biography makes a strong initial step in recovering the work of a woman writer and scholar, and it demonstrates the ways that any given historical subject may be both profoundly of and beyond her own times. It is in this spirit that Olson finds his strongest voice, and perhaps because of his careful research we may begin to hear more voices such as Mary Alicia Owen’s emerge from the archives.”—Journal of Southern History

“Greg Olson’s skillfully crafted portrait of folklorist and writer Mary Alicia Owen tells a story that ranges far beyond the bounds of folklore and romantic fiction.”—William E. Foley