Mayne Reid: A Memoir of His Life

This memoir opens as a daughter attempts to capture a father who defied easy description. Mayne Reid was an Irish adventure novelist whose tales of sword fights, frontier escapes, and exotic locales made him one of the most widely read writers of the nineteenth century, yet his own life read like one of his novels. Elizabeth Hyde Reid traces his journey from a thoughtful Irish childhood in a well-educated family, through his youthful flirtation with the clergy (quickly abandoned for more adventurous pursuits), to his emigration to America where he taught, wrote, and eventually fought as a soldier in the Mexican-American War. The memoir offers intimate glimpses of his friendship with Edgar Allan Poe, his years as a literary man in New York, and the dynamic personality that made him both celebrated and controversial. Written in 1875, this is not detached biography but a daughter's loving act of preservation - an attempt to fix on the page a man who was never still long enough to be fully known. It will appeal to readers who savor Victorian memoir, literary history, and the particular tenderness of children trying to understand their parents.