Sherry recently finished writing this exciting non-fiction story and it’s with a publisher for consideration.
It’s the story of an aristocratic family who settled the rugged land of Lake County, California in the 1880s. Their motive was to gain back the money they lost in England, but these white-glove aristocrats preferred cricket, boating, and acting over the chores of farming. Their story ends with failure, infidelity, family loss, and a scandalous divorce. While the men enjoyed themselves, Ethel Marian Barry Hertslet learned important life lessons, and her time on a California ranch gave her the strength she needed to deal with her real-life drama.
Like many other writers and historians of the American West, I was drawn to letters written by someone who traversed, lived, and called the west home in the late 1800s. They document the western experience of an affluent young Englishwoman who, along with her aristocratic husband and his brothers, set sail in 1885 for California seeking to make their fortune. Her story adds flesh, bone, and a much-needed woman’s perspective to settlement and ranching history. To read the candid words of someone who lived over a century ago is truly enlightening. Not only do you see the aristocratic E.M.H. as a woman searching for happiness, but you learn about her struggles and triumphs at new endeavors. She grows from a dependent daughter to an independent ranch wife. She describes the American landscape, current trends and news, and other events that are so invaluable because they are told by someone who lived it.
Beginning with her first Atlantic voyage, Ethel writes home about the journey aboard the S.S. Britannic, the people she met on the ship and the conditions at sea. Her letters to England continue when they land in New York, as they cross the United States, and once they reach their final destination in a rugged portion of Lake County, California known as Burns Valley.
For eighteen months she writes about their hopes, their social life, and their struggle to ranch. The letters end just shortly after the birth of her first child in 1886. Despite the short span of her correspondence, there is much to hold the attention. Readers witness Ethel’s transformation from a rigid, high society woman who has never set foot in her parent’s English kitchen to an invested rancher’s wife who nurses a sick kitten back to health, milk’s cows, and has a pet lamb who sleeps on her lap. Ethel is forever the animal lover.
I hope To California and Back provides readers with a sense of what life was like for an affluent young Victorian woman searching for happiness. During her quest she found and lost loves, birthed and buried children, played Broadway, and endured scandals and estrangement from those she loved.
