All the Days of My Life

A Methodist minister's daughter from Lancashire marries a Scot at nineteen, follows him to Texas, loses him and three sons to yellow fever in Galveston, and turns to writing to feed the daughters who are left. Amelia Barr went on to publish more than seventy books and wrote this memoir at eighty-two. It is the least self-pitying account of nineteenth-century American hardship in print, and the hardest to put down. Forty-nine plates of Constable and Grimshaw, from Liverpool docks to Yorkshire homes, restore the landscapes of a life that crossed an ocean and never stopped looking back.