The story of Rosemond Tuve, a remarkable woman scholar, who began her life on the vast plains of South Dakota and rose to honor and acclaim here and abroad, is told mainly in her own compelling voice through letters, diaries, and lectures that are witty, profound, and eminently readable. A reading of Tuve's life is a reflection on education and the rewards of the life of the mind. It portrays also a woman's struggles to rise to the top of a male-dominated profession. In this process she became the first woman to lecture in the English departments of Harvard and Princeton, and to be appointed professor at the University of Pennsylvania.In the end, her legacy is her students, who found her teaching to be in the nature of a revelation and were galvanized for life, and her colleagues, who discovered how passionately she believed in the power of education to transform the lives of women and men. Yet, above all, she remained devoted to her family and the prairies, those distances that extend to infinity.
