The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 93, July 1989 - April, 1990 Page: 541

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Book Reviews

tionship to Garibaldi and Ludwig II, her sudden departure for the
New World, and the resumption of her career. She also illuminates the
meaning of Ney's three ideal works, which before seemed incongruous
in the midst of the portraits. In such a careful work, it is only lamentable
that on the whole the photos are both poor and poorly reproduced,
often taken from the plaster rather than the marble. The reader hears
Ney's voice in the stubbornly ungrammatical quotations but does not
see the work.
John Jay College and Graduate Center MARLENE PARK
City Unzversity of New York
Windfall and Other Stories. By Winifred M. Sanford. Foreword by Emer-
ett Sanford Miles. Afterword by Lou Halsell Rodenberger. (Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1988. Pp. xviii+ 170. Fore-
word, illustration, afterword. $17.95, cloth; $8.95, paper.)
Winifred M. Sanford grew up in Minnesota, went to school in Massa-
chusetts, married a fledgling attorney in Manhattan, and, in 192o,
found herself in Wichita Falls at the height of the postwar oil boom.
She responded to a different world by writing, first about the midwest-
ern environment she left behind, then about her new Texas surround-
ings. Between 1925 and 1931 her short stories appeared in Woman's
Home Companion and H. L. Mencken's American Mercury. Relocation to
Dallas, maternal obligations, and illness then seem to have ended her
drive to write. Now her daughter, Emerett Sanford Miles, has allowed
Southern Methodist University Press to reissue her collected short
stories. Lou Halsell Rodenberger offers a useful afterword on Sanford's
place among Texan women writers.
Windfall will interest scholars of women's history. Most of Sanford's
stories are about women and their lives. Her heroines, however, usually
have more in common with the world of Godey's Lady's Book than that of
F. Scott Fitzgerald or Dorothy Parker. Widowed Kate in "Fools," for ex-
ample, loses her savings and offers to go to the poor farm so that her
adult daughter Pauline will not have to care for her (Pauline counters
by marrying to give her mother a home). Cora, self-sacrificing mother
in "Windfall," wants nothing more from oil wealth but a new set of den-
tures and fears oily riches will destroy her children's morals. Far from
the flapper, Sanford's typical heroine offers us submissiveness, domes-
ticity, and maternity as paramount values.
Though evocative of boomtimes in North and East Texas, Sanford's
stories relating to oil ("Windfall," "Luck," "Mr. Carmichael's Room,"
and "Fever in the South") fall back on stock figures of oil-field folklore:
the driller-promoter gambling for high stakes, the innocent country

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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 93, July 1989 - April, 1990, periodical, 1990; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101213/m1/611/ocr/: accessed March 29, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.

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