Polly's friendship with the wealthy Shaws of Boston helps them to build a new life and teaches her the truth about the relationship between happiness and riches.

Polly's friendship with the wealthy Shaws of Boston helps them to build a new life and teaches her the truth about the relationship between happiness and riches.

Elisabeth Parker comes to California from Massachusetts in 1849 with her new husband, Nate, to reunite with her father, who’s struck gold on the American River. But she soon realizes her husband is not the man she thought―and neither is her father, who abandons them shortly after they arrive. As Nate struggles with his sexuality, Elisabeth is forced to confront her preconceived notions of family, love, and opportunity. She finds comfort in corresponding with her childhood friend back home, writer Louisa May Alcott, and spending time in the company of a mysterious California. Armed with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, she sets out to determine her role in building the West, even as she comes to terms with the sacrifices she must make to achieve independence and happiness. A gripping and illuminating window into life in the Old West, Prospects of a Woman is the story of one woman’s passionate quest to carve out a place for herself in the liberal and bewildering society that emerged during the California gold rush frenzy.

"In December 1862, the Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and threatened to break apart Abraham Lincoln's government. Five extraordinary individuals experienced Fredericksburg's cataclysmic repercussions -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, John Pelham, and Arthur Fuller. Guided by duty, driven by desire, they moved toward lofty destinies: a young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by guardians of propriety, a struggling writer desperate to serve the cause and gain her philosopher father's admiration, a West Point cadet from Alabama excelling in artillery tactics, and a one-eyed minister seeking to prove his manhood. Because of what they saw and suffered, America, too, would never be the same."--

Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England. A classic story of New England homelife, based on the author's own life.