Blurb

Set against the expansion of a nation, from the aftermath of the War of 1812 to the era preceding the Civil War, this story ushers you into a world teeming with romance, jealousy, murder, and the unyielding spirit of survival.

Meet Easter, a formidable young woman who carves her homestead from the 1830s American Northwest frontier. With the fires of Manifest Destiny as a backdrop, Easter’s tenacity and resilience are tested amidst a young nation’s political turmoil and societal upheavals.

This vivid tale transports you back to a time where the foundation stones of the modern United States were laid. Witness iconic historical figures such as Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Blackhawk, and many more, through Easter’s eyes—a testament to an era where politics, much like today, were intense and vehement.

As Easter navigates through the unrelenting trials of pioneer life, readers are pulled into a world of passion and peril. Easter’s journey from the Mohawk Valley to the American Northwest is one marked by love, betrayal, and the haunting echo of murder.

Review

A Profitable Wife by Kat Christensen follows the life of Easter Hackley from 1812, the year of her birth, to 1857. Her father Robert, who had been fighting for the United States in the War of 1812, died of wounds when she was less than a month old. Although her mother Sooleawa, who had Algonquin ancestry, died when Easter was seven, it was time enough for her to teach Easter the Algonquin language and their ways of hunting and foraging. Easter was raised as a daughter by her paternal uncle and his wife; her uncle was a farmer and ran a mercantile store in Herkimer, in New York’s Mohawk Valley. At sixteen Easter married Will Conklin, a young man with plans to establish a farm in the lands to the west that were opening up to settlers. Not long after their wedding they set out for Ohio.

The novel shows their life over the next twenty-eight years: the discomforts, difficulties and hopefulness of their journey to Ohio by longboat and later by covered wagon, a journey where Easter gave birth to their first child. The hard work and struggles of farming, and Easter’s essential role in ensuring it was a success. In 1848, Easter and their ten children, aged from seventeen to one year old, followed Will to Iowa to more fertile land. The journey was more fraught with danger than their original journey to Ohio.

Christensen shows in detail the struggles and hardships these pioneers faced, the way they built communities and friendships, the critical importance of women’s skills in making a success of their endeavours. The novel is underpinned by detailed research into the period and brings the past to life. There is a broad cast of characters from Easter and her children, who we follow from birth to adulthood and marriage, to other settlers including newly arrived immigrants, to Native Americans who are displaced as the settlers move westward, to the politicians who made decisions that affected all their lives. All the characters are distinct and well-drawn, even those who simply pass through the story. Woven through the novel are chapters and scenes involving the politicians and those with influence which allow readers, especially those without a strong grasp of this period of American history, to understand the political decisions and attitudes which influenced the way the United States developed at this time.

A Profitable Wife is realistically told – the characters and relationships, especially of Easter and Will, are believable and develop naturally. Just as in life, small character flaws that niggle at the beginning, with time and age, develop into fissures that can tear people apart. There are the joys and absolute heartbreak that pioneer women experienced. The writing is engaging and the language the characters speak in keeping with the period, without anachronism. There are tense and gripping passages filled with genuine tension as they confront the dangers and difficulties of their lives. It is a narrative the reader can submerge herself in.

The novel is based on stories Kat Christensen was told, in whispers, by her grandmother of her own great-grandmother, Easter Hackley, ‘a scrappy pioneer, a survivor, and a successful human being’ who raised thirteen of her fourteen children to adulthood. Naturally, with a life at such a distance in time, not everything is known, but Christensen has filled in the gaps with plausible conjecture based on serious research of the period and the locations where Easter lived.

A Profitable Wife is a tribute to the strength and character of not just Easter but all those women who left behind their family, friends and familiar lives to settle in unknown and challenging territories and establish families that now count in their thousands. It is an engrossing story of love and joy, sorrow and endurance. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in the reality of those women of the past who played a part in making our modern more comfortable lives possible.