Author Jane Kirkpatrick’s new historical novel, Everything She Didn’t Say, reveals the plight of many women, even today.
The novel is based on a true story, and knowing Kirkpatrick’s skillful extensive research, there is probably more truth than fiction to this story.
The novel takes place in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Carrie, the daughter of a prominent physician, married Robert Strahorn who worked for the Union Pacific railroad. His job was to develop new towns that the railroad would follow on its way west. Robert also wrote books and pamphlets designed to entice people west.
Carrie and Robert’s years were filled with adventure, riding for miles by stagecoach or horseback. Although these adventures sound exciting, what they really amounted to were unending days in gritty, jolting stagecoaches, days not necessarily ending with hot meals and a decent place to sleep. Carrie yearned for a normal home and children, yet she knew Robert’s dream and dedication to his job when she married him. She just thought it would some day end.
In 1911, Carrie wrote a memoir sharing some of the exciting events of the past twenty-five years of shaping the American West with her husband. That book, Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, is still available today. Throughout Everything She Didn’t Say, excerpts from that memoir are highlighted. But also highlighted are Carrie’s private thoughts, revealing and stark, about her struggles to accept her own worth, not to become lost in her husband’s ambition, and the pain and disappointments of a pioneering life.
Everything She Didn’t Say is a remarkable novel, a work of deep thought and emotion. I highly recommend this heartfelt historical novel.