After the 1872 publication of Exposé,Fanny Stenhouse became a celebrity in the cultural wars between Mormons and much of America. An English convert, she had grown disillusioned with the Mormon Church and polygamy, which her husband practiced before associating with a circle of dissident Utah intellectuals and merchants. Stenhouse’s critique of plural marriage, Brigham Young, and Mormonism was also a sympathetic look at Utah’s people and honest recounting of her life. She later created a new edition, titled "Tell It All," which ensured her notoriety in Utah and popularity elsewhere but turned her thoughtful memoir into a more polemical, true exposé of Polygamy. Since 1874, it has stayed in print, in multiple, varying editions. The original book, meanwhile, is less known, though more readable. Tracing the literary history of Stenhouse’s important piece of Americana, Linda DeSimone rescues an important autobiographical and historical record from the baggage notoriety brought to it.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

In this candid, balanced account of the practice of plural marriage early in the history of the Mormon Church, Charlotte Cannon Johnston focuses on the lives of her four great-grandmothers and other women in her family who faced the challenges of plural marriage. She uses their lives as a springboard to discuss the reasons for and characteristics of polygamy for the fifty-some years it was practiced in the early Church and the repercussions of the practice that continue today.

EXPOSE of POLYGAMY in UTAH. A Lady's Life Among The Mormons....

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