Nothing Daunted (36 page)

On sunny days at recess, the boys liked to ski down the hill by the school

A S
CRIBNER
R
EADING
G
ROUP
G
UIDE
N
OTHING
D
AUNTED
BY
D
OROTHY
W
ICKENDEN

Q
UESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. In the prologue, Wickenden calls Ros and Dorothy’s adventure “an alternative Western.” What do you think she means by this? After finishing the book, do you agree? How does their story compare to your idea of the classic Western?

2. Dorothy and Ros, Wickenden writes, were
“bothered by the idea of settling into a staid life of marriage and motherhood without having contributed anything to people who could benefit from the few talents and experiences they had to offer”
. How does this statement influence your perspective of Ros and Dorothy? What did they eventually pass along to the students of Elkhead? What did they learn from their students and their families?

3. How are Ros and Dorothy different from each other? How are they similar?

4. Each section and chapter opens with a photograph—from Dorothy as a twelve-year-old in Auburn to Bob Perry outside his cabin in Oak Hills. How did these pictures shape or enhance your reading of
Nothing Daunted
? How did they add to your understanding of the setting and time period?

5. Similarly, how did the inclusion of letters and notes enhance your reading? Was there one particular or memorable correspondence that stood out to you?

6. William H. Seward was known as a firebrand for representing the black defendant in a notorious murder case and for befriending abolitionist Harriet Tubman. What influence did Seward, Tubman, and other strong personalities in Auburn have on Dorothy and Ros?

7. How would you define Ros and Dorothy’s teaching experience in one word? How did people react to their arrival in Elkhead? How did the girls’ families react to their decision to leave the comforts of their homes in Auburn?

8. How would you describe Ferry Carpenter? Wickenden writes that he
“believed that American democracy was born on the frontier”
. What effect did the lawlessness and opportunities of the West have on Ferry’s imagination and aspirations? How did the frontier influence Ros and Dorothy?

9. Discuss the title of the book. Do you think it refers to the heroines’ courage? What kind of education did Dorothy and Ros themselves receive in the West?

10. After Ros and Dorothy applied to be teachers, Ferry was told that one of the applicants
“was voted the best-looking girl in the junior class of Smith College!”
. What advantages—educational, social, physical—did Ros and Dorothy have over other applicants? What were their potential disadvantages?

11. Ros and Dorothy received nearly identical scores on their Colorado teachers’ exams. Ros wrote to her mother:
“I think Mrs. Peck must have been perjuring her soul, to give [those scores] to us”
. What did she mean?

12. How did the structure of the narrative, with its flashbacks to the past and flash-forwards to the current day, influence how you read
Nothing Daunted
?

13. Do you think anyone else could have written this story about Ros and Dorothy’s time in Colorado? How would the story have been different if it was not written from the perspective of a family member?

E
NHANCE
Y
OUR
B
OOK
C
LUB

1. Wickenden writes that Dorothy “recorded an oral history, speaking with unerring precision about her childhood and about her time in Colorado. Retrieving the transcript of the tape, I was reminded of the breathtaking brevity of America’s past” (page xi). Try recording a brief oral history of your own, perhaps about an important trip you took, a big event in your family, or some other significant milestone. Did you remember details from the story that you had forgotten by saying it aloud?

2. Find some old letters, postcards, diaries, or other artifacts of your family’s past. After reading and taking notes on their contents, write a short narrative of an event from within—a trip, a wedding, or some other event. Be sure to include whatever details you can to give it real shape.

3. Prepare some recipes that have been passed down in your family. Perhaps, like the miners of Oak Creek, members of your family were immigrants, bringing recipes with them. Alternatively, look through a relative’s cookbook for something you’ve had with them before. Bring the dish to your book club meeting and share the history of the dish.

A C
ONVERSATION
B
ETWEEN
D
OROTHY
W
ICKENDEN AND
N
EW
Y
ORKER
E
DITOR
D
AVID
R
EMNICK AT
M
C
N
ALLY
J
ACKSON
B
OOKS
, N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
, J
UNE
23, 2011

David Remnick:
Dorothy and I started at the
New Yorker
at about the same time—I as a writer and Dorothy as executive editor. There is no one at the
New Yorker
who has helped transform the magazine more. Her gift for language, her gift for people, and her extraordinary sense of judgment and fairness have benefited everybody and everything that she’s touched. So I’m doubly delighted that she decided to write this book.

Dorothy, what were you thinking? Most writers are writers, and most editors are editors. You opened a drawer, both spiritually and physically, and something happened. What made you decide to write when you opened this drawer and found the letters of your grandmother?

Dorothy Wickenden:
My mother gave me the letters twenty years ago, and said, “These are your grandmother’s letters from Colorado.” I knew the stories well because she had told them to me when I was little. I had wanted to read them one day, but I forgot about them because I was bringing up two children and had a busy job. I stuck them in the back of a drawer. Then one day, in the fall of 2008, I was laid up with a broken ankle for two weeks and I was sitting with my left foot propped up on my desk with a bag of ice over it. I thought, “Time to clean out some old files.” I found a folder way in the back that said “Dorothy Woodruff Letters 1916–1917.” I started reading the first letter, which my grandmother had written right after they arrived in the tiny frontier town of Hayden. It began, “My dearest family,
can you believe I’m actually out here in Colorado?” It was very far away from where she had grown up in New York, and I was pulled in immediately. She wrote those letters when she was twenty-nine years old. Even though her voice was totally familiar to me, I was reading them as a middle-aged editor, and I knew from the first page that this was a great piece of writing and an amazing story. I sat down and I read them all. And later I came to David [Remnick] and said, “You know, I have this story about my grandmother. Do you think we can do something about it in the
New Yorker
?”

DR:
How well did you know your grandmother? What was the familiarity you had from life rather than from found objects and letters?

DW:
She died after I graduated from college. She was ninety-three. She lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I lived in Weston, Connecticut. She’d visit us a couple of times a year, and it was always a great event. She was tiny, four foot eleven, a little lady with white hair, but a complete powerhouse. She had an unbelievably dynamic character. Somewhat Victorian, but with a spirit of independence and can-do. She was always a wonderful storyteller, but I didn’t realize quite how good she was until I read the letters.

DR:
What did you see in the letters? What did they suggest in terms of a story? Finding letters in drawers is the way any number of novelists might begin their narrative.

DW:
My grandmother and her friend Rosamond had grown up in a very wealthy industrial city in midstate New York. They were brought up as proper young ladies. They went to Smith College at a time when few girls had any kind of higher education. Afterward, they were expected to return to Auburn to marry. They didn’t want to do that.

DR:
Why not?

DW:
They were somewhat contemptuous of the young men they met. When I was in college, I went to visit her. “Dorothy, dear,” she said, “do you have a beau?” That was the word she used. And I said, “No, I haven’t really met anybody interesting yet.” And she said, “Well, as you’ll discover, most men are terribly stupid.” My cousin was in the car, and she hastily added, “Oh, not your father. Not your uncle.”

There was a very prestigious seminary in Auburn—the Auburn Theological Seminary—where a lot of the young women found their
husbands. My grandmother and Ros just thought they were too effete and really not worth considering. So, they graduated from Smith, went back home, and did not marry. Then they convinced Rosamond’s parents to take them to Europe for a year and they went on an extremely lavish trip.

DR:
The Grand Tour.

DW:
The Grand Tour.

DR:
So, they were like Henry James characters.

DW:
Totally like Henry James characters, and they did the whole thing, went to about six countries, ended up in Paris. In 1910. At the age of twenty-two or twenty-three. On their own because their parents had gone home. They had the time of their lives. They went to the opera every other night. They went to see Isadora Duncan dance when she was at the beginning of her career. They saw Nijinsky dance in
Scheherazade
. My grandmother wrote a letter home almost every day to someone in her family. She had six siblings. And she wrote different kinds of letters to each one, depending on what his or her interests were.

DR:
All of these letters became available to you?

DW:
Yes, later on, after I finished the
New Yorker
piece. I hadn’t even known about the Europe letters.

DR:
In Henry James, the woman of means goes east—Isabel Archer. All the great heroines—they go to Paris, they go to London. Your grandmother and Rosamond go west. How did that happen and why? That’s your story—go west, young girl.

DW:
That’s the story. They got back after this unbelievably wonderful trip to Europe. And not surprisingly, they were bored by the constricting rituals of Auburn society. Ten-course luncheons, charity balls, bridge—for six long years.

DR:
They didn’t want to go to the big city?

DW:
They did go to New York one year, where, once again, their parents expected them to meet somebody eligible. Ros was very beautiful—tall and willowy, with thick brown hair. Men kept falling in love with her.

DR:
And she was not interested?

DW:
There was one very persistent young man in New York. He was in shipping. But my grandmother made it clear that he was not up to
Rosamond’s standards. She described him as a “regular Miss Nancy,” and said, “Needless to say, Rosamond wasn’t interested.”

So, they were in Auburn, bored out of their minds. They were feminists, and they were in the heart of suffrage country. The women who initiated the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 lived in Auburn. Dorothy and Ros went out and stood on soapboxes—literally—and advocated women’s rights. As my grandmother put it, “My parents thought this was absurd. We were in this troubled state of mind when an unusual opportunity presented itself.”

Rosamond had tea with an acquaintance, a graduate of Wellesley, who’d just gotten back from visiting a friend whose brother ended up being the hero of my book: Ferry Carpenter. Ferry was a young lawyer and homesteader on the Western Slope of Colorado, which was still mostly unsettled. He and his neighbors had just built a beautiful stone schoolhouse in the mountains for the children of homesteaders, and he was looking for two cultivated young teachers from the East. Ferry went to Princeton and Harvard Law School, and Ros immediately perked up. She rushed to the telephone: “Dotty, we must talk about this. We’ve got to go out and teach school in Colorado.” My grandmother, who lived around the corner, ran over. They instantly decided, yes, we’re going to do this.