Mary Hallock Foote’s life and work were Stegner’s sources for his book. Besides the memoir and letters, Mary’s short stories and travel pieces contain many precise details that Stegner borrowed. Susan Burling Ward’s character is vivified and illuminated by Foote’s own writing long passages taken from her memoir and letters provide a graceful counterpoint to Stegner’s often prosaic prose. Scene after scene based on the main character - Mary Hallock Foote/Susan Burling Ward - comes directly from Foote’s memoir. When I read Hall’s essay, I bought Foote’s memoir - A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West - and there it was: the origin of Angle of Repose. Much of the prose seemed dull and airless, the scenes quotidian, and the dialogue wooden. Here’s more:Īngle of Repose has been called one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. She does, and would you believe it, folks, she finds Robinson’s prose so much better than Stegner’s “prosaic prose.” That’s a direct quote. She has “never admired” the novel, she writes, but had never read Robinson’s memoir. This is all old news, but in her piece in the New Yorker, Robinson wants to take Stegner down a notch. The family was upset that Ward has an affair in the novel, something that Foote did not do, even though Stegner made it clear that the novel was not about real people. Stegner admitted later that there was a connection between Susan Burling Ward, the character based on Foote, and his own mother.

Instead, Stegner took the events of Foote’s life and altered her character. They were expecting something like a biographical novel. That granddaughter apparently hoped that Stegner’s use of the material in the novel might reignite interest in her grandmother’s largely forgotten life and writing, which it did.īut the family wasn’t happy after the novel was published. Stegner received permission from one of Foote’s granddaughters to use the letters and memoir as he saw fit.

Stegner quoted thirty-eight passages from Foote’s letters (not her memoir, according to Jackson Benson’s introduction to the novel), which came to roughly sixty-three pages of text in a novel of over 600 pages. In the New Yorker, Roxana Robinson revisits the old story of Wallace Stegner’s use of Mary Hallock Foote’s unpublished memoir and letters for his novel The Angle of Repose.

Wallace stegner's angle of repose