An Iowa Schoolma’am Letters of Elizabeth “Bess” Corey 1904 – 1908 is a research book I found in writing my next novel which takes place in Camanche, Iowa, in 1908. This is sort of a prequel to Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Core, 1909 – 1919, which I haven’t read. It is a non-fiction book containing Elizabeth’s letters almost exactly how she’d written them with notes by the editors of enclosures or explanations of certain people, places, or things.

I found the book interesting, though I didn’t get much concrete research material. It did, however, give me a feel of the time period, including how people communicated, traveled, and dealt with the weather.

The book contains letters Elizabeth Corey wrote mostly to her mother while she was either training to be a teacher or teaching students away from home, boarding with a local family. There are gaps, of course, when she was at home and didn’t need to write letters to her mother who kept the correspondence. Once chapter does contain letters Elizabeth wrote at home while taking over there while her mother was in Omaha, Nebraska, having and recovering from a surgery.

I love reading books like this with real artifacts of real people who lived in real times. It makes me a little sad that all of the emails, tweets, and social media posts are so fleeting. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could cull the Internet as nothing is ever really deleted. But there’s nothing to be passed down from generation to generation and discovered in some attic somewhere.

I read this book relatively quickly, so on a can’t-put-it-down-scale of one for I couldn’t even finish it to ten for I was up until the wee morning hours, I give it a six and a half.

Source: Gerber, Philip L. and Wright, Charlotte M., Editors. (2011) An Iowa Schoolma’am Letters of Elizabeth “Bess” Corey, 1904 – 1908. University of Iowa Press.