Daughter of Earth (e-book) (used book) | Agnes Smedley | bookbook.eu

Description

This lyrical autobiographical novel tells the story of Marie Rogers, born into harsh rural poverty in northern Missouri at the end of the last century. Hers is a family nurtured in poverty - her father a charming but shiftless itinerant worker, her mother undernourished and overworked. In a world where the choices for a woman are marriage or prostitution, Marie is fiercely determined to choose neither.

Struggling to educate herself, haunted by the family she leaves behind, Marie's restless nature cannot reconcile sexual desire with love and comradeship. Marriage ends in divorce, political involvement in imprisonment, a passionate love affair in betrayal. But through all this Marie finds herself - the past conquered, a new future ahead.

Agnes Smedley (1892-1950), author and foreign correspondent, champion of revolution in China, friend of Mao Tse-Sung and Edgar Snow, published either works of non-fiction. With the forcefulness of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath this, her only work of fiction, is 'a testament to those who do not die of beauty, nor of love, those of the earth whose life is a struggle for survival'. First published in America in 1929, it is a classic of twentieth-century American literature.