The Lieutenant’s Lady

A novel of…wholly fresh and convincing quality…Mrs. Aldrich, who is a good story-teller herself, has had the discretion to leave her source material substantially unaltered. In all its simple and artless detail… The Lieutenant’s Lady bears the unmistakable stamp of truth. - New York Times. When Linnie Colsworth came from the East to visit relatives in Omaha, she was plunged into a wider, more hazardous world than she had ever known. In the wake of the Civil War, land seekers were pouring into the West and displacing the Indian tribes. Although Omaha was beginning to put on social airs, Nebraska was still a raw territory. Not one to take shelter and spend her days sewing and serving tea, Linnie traveled up the Missouri to deliver a Dear John message to her cousin’s fiance, a handsome lieutenant - and in a wink became the wife of this stranger. They came to love and trust each other, and their survival on the frontier required nothing less, and a good deal more, from them than that. Their harrowing story is based on the diary of an actual army wife who recorded the daily weather - internal and external.
The Lieutenant’s Lady , which appeared on best-seller lists in 1942, is part of a series of stories and novels by Bess Streeter Aldrich to be reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press.