Even her wedding was unhappy--conducted in secrecy and not immediately consummated. She spent the night with her parents. After a simple dinner, she thought, "Well, this is my wedding supper." Not until three weeks later did her husband arrive to sleep with her, then returned to his first wife. Within six months he was courting another young woman.

Twenty-nine years later, according to Annie: "One Sunday morning as my husband and I stood on the front porch of our home together, he informed me that he would not come to Farmington to see us any more." Their marriage ended as unceremoniously as it had begun, with another surprise when, "As he stepped from the porch to the walk, he turned to add: 'You must look to your brothers for help.'" She would receive no alimony or child support. In the end, even though Annie was a good mother, she was, like so many other plural wives, little more than a mistress to her husband.

Annie Clark Tanner was born September 24, 1864, in Farmington, Utah, the oldest child of Ezra Thompson Clark and his polygamous second wife, Susan Leggett. While a student at Brigham Young Academy, she became the plural wife of a faculty member, Joseph Tanner, by whom she had eight children in an otherwise unhappy marriage. In 1931 she wrote A Biography of Ezra Thompson Clark, about her father, and, ten years later--the last year of her life--her autobiography, A Mormon Mother, which historian Dale Morgan later called "one of the monuments of Mormon literature." It has been celebrated on stage through BYU graduate student Brian Gibson's A Mormon Mother: A Play in Four Acts.

Obert C. Tanner is the author of New Testament Studies, The New Testament Speaks, Christ’s Ideals for Living, and co-author of Toward Understanding the New Testament. He is the editor of his mother’s autobiography, A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography by Annie Clark Tanner. He holds the juris doctor degree from the University of Utah. He studied at Harvard and Stanford universities and was on the faculty of religious studies at Stanford. Tanner is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and is the founder of the international series "The Tanner Lectures on Human Values." He is an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy; an Honorary Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford University; an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University; and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Utah.