The Family of Sukey Lewis in the Plantation South. Like One Year From Tonight that story also includes real diaries and letters. It is the heart breaking story of a young woman in the Reconstruction Era trying to rebuild her life after she lost her parents and home. Thank God We Have the Comfort of Heaven. Other books of mine which you might enjoy include: If you just can’t wait to read the entire novel, you may purchase it now for Kindle at Amazon. In between those posts I will share background information. I hope you will join me here as I release a new chapter of ONE YEAR FROM TONIGHT each Monday and Friday. But be sure to keep checking back here for background information and discussion! The amazon link is If you can’t wait - you may buy the entire novel now for Kindle at Amazon. One senses that her time in Persia had educated her as much as she had educated others for there is a softer note in how she is remembered from this time, as a woman of “great discretion with an intuitive knowledge of human nature.” She was to die 26 July 1864, not long after Emily read about her but after Emily had made her choice about whether or not to go to the foreign mission field. Holyoke, telling students what they needed to know in order to become missionaries. She recovered some strength on the long voyage back to the States and was able to spend the next five years as something of a “scholar in residence” at Mt. In the next few years Fidelia preached to and converted ninety three married women of the town.īy the early 1850s Fidelia’s health was deteriorating and finally in 1859 she realized she had to leave Persia. With Miss Rice’s arrival, Fidelia turned her attention to what had troubled her during her four years - the plight of the married women, many still children, whom she feared would die young before hearing about her faith. Holyoke (the real one) to help Fidelia teach. So by 1847 there were 40 pupils and a Miss Rice came from Mt. But the school offered good meals, a higher likelihood of living through the cholera that ravaged the region each year, and a place for the surplus of girls who outnumbered the men. She gave lots of lessons on her ideal of bathing and washing. Holyoke in Persia” as “dirty, wild, ragged, filth, and untutored given to lying, stealing and other vices.” She taught them in their native language but limited her teaching to the Bible and bathing and laundry. With a prejudice which jars today but was in keeping with her era, Fidelia described the girls who came to what she termed “My Mt. Part of Fidelia’s task was to help round up pupils and as Fidelia quickly learned the local dialect she soon was able to induce girls to come to the school. The local men opposed the education of women and most girls were married before they were 14 years old. The mission school had been open for nine years but only two girls had ever attended. The Perkins and Fidelia arrived Oroomiah on 14 June 1843. Fidelia had simply written, “If counted worthy I should be willing to go.” Perkins put out a call for a woman to accompany them to Persia to teach girls to read they had over forty responses and chose the author of the shortest letter. She had tried a year of teaching after she was graduated and one can imagine that she had little patience with girls of a less serious nature than her own.
That is nineteenth century code to describe a woman who did not see herself as able or interested in playing the courtship game a man expected.Īs the only child of a widowed mother, Fidelia could not look to a father or a brother to support her.
Like Emily, Fidelia found herself in her mid twenties with no husband and, if one knows how to read between the lines, with little prospect of a husband, for she described herself as stubborn, with a will not easily bent except to God, and not given to discourse. Holyoke Seminary, the school on which Emily’s own had been modeled. Fiske was her similarity to Emily at the time Miss Fiske had made her choice.īorn in Shelburne, Massachusetts in 1816, Fidelia Fiske was an 1842 gradate of Mt. What must have struck Emily most about that account of Mrs. Parker about the possibility of joining her “in the foreign mission field” she had just finished reading a book about a Miss Fiske, who had been a teacher in Persia. When Emily decides to correspond with Mrs.