Mary Rankin 1821-1889.(LEGACY PROFILE)(Biography)

Born and raised in rural west-central Pennsylvania, Mary Rankin is not a writer known to literary scholars today. Plagued by a lifetime of illness, she produced only one book, Daughter of Affliction: A Memoir of the Protracted Sufferings and Religious Experience of Miss Mary Rankin. (1) That book, the collaborative product of Rankin, her physicians, and her community, offers readers an example of nineteenth-century conversion and illness narratives, while its attention to the details of life in a small town anticipates the later interests of local color fiction.

As such, it is worthy ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.