Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewFormal in its dialogue, passionate and romantic in its evocation of the Southwest, where the central action takes place, this slender novella is at heart a feminist tract. . . . Written in 1927 and never before published, the story is timeless in setting and moral tone. Like Austin's other novels (
Earth Horizon,
Land of Little Rain), it is a powerful enactment of a woman's need to choose between a man and the land she loves."" —
Publishers Weekly ""In
Cactus Thorn, Austin has combined the clear, bone-deep prose of her finest landscape writing with a complex psychological portrait of a love affair, producing what must surely rank as a new classic of western American literature.""—
San Francisco Review of Books ""Mary Austin speaks powerfully to our own historical movement, for she experienced and wrote about much that feminist scholars have recently unearthed—the transformative power of the land, the costs of women’s lives of action, essential tensions between the sexes, a woman’s love of what men once called the waste places of the West.""—
The Women’s Review of Books ""To paraphrase Graulich's summation: this book liberates a woman's wit, anger, and imagination.""—Judy Nolte Lensink, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women
