Anderson's two superb introductions explain the book's history and Lucy's intense spirituality. A foreword by Irene M. Bates argues that Lucy was the embodiment of republican motherhood. The memoir itself expresses outrage at the persecution of her family and other Mormons, laments the corruptions of the country and the rejection of Joseph Smith's message, recounts the early history of the church, anticipates the immediacy of the Second Coming of Christ, and claims a special place for her as the "Mother of the Church." Even Mormons may be surprised to learn that Lucy was the only woman to speak at an LDS general conference before 1998. Lucy's narrative is church history, family history, and a woman's deeply personal and tragic story. Her story is one-sided, but Anderson believes that it should be counted "among the treasures of Mormon women's personal writings" (p. 166).

The bulk of the book reproduces in parallel columns Lucy's rough draft and the 1853 edition with footnotes that clarify, correct, emend, and/or compare the texts with other sources. Anderson's scholarship is meticulous, and her research is awesome. A chronology of both the family and the publication dates of various editions as well as a biographical summary of individuals mentioned in the work enhance her volume.

Anderson is critical of how the church hierarchy treated Lucy and her book. "'Overreaction,'" she writes, "is perhaps the most charitable way to characterize the rather obvious discrepancy between the staggering official denunciation and the relatively minor and infrequent errors (if indeed they are genuine errors) that Lucy actually makes" (p. 122). Anderson's indictment of Young is devastating: "It is distressing to see the president of the church slander the mental competence of a seventy-year-old woman when the documentary record ... shows otherwise. It is unpleasant to hear a man revered as a prophet sneer at the faithful mother of twelve ... dismissing her as a sensation seeker and novelist. And it is particularly disappointing to hear him justify these behaviors by accusations that the book is a 'tissue of falsehoods,' an accusation that, on close inspection, is itself a falsehood" (pp. 131-132).

This book is not for everyone, but historians of Mormonism, the West, and women will find it immensely valuable.

Journal of the West, Gary Topping
Scholars of early Mormon history are fortunate to have in print for the first time the original (1844-1845) draft of the reminiscences of Lucy Mack Smith, mother of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. That text, with her interlineations and deletions, is presented here as literally as typography permits, in a definitive various edition showing later editorial changes by Lucy Smith and others, including those of her amanuensis, Martha Coray, and Mormon apostle Orson Pratt, whose 1853 English edition is given in a parallel column.

As important as this text is for Mormon history, the editor rightly emphasizes its equal importance as a spiritual autobiography and as a primary soruce on women's domestic and larger cultural roles during the early republic. Navigating the various texts and editorial apparatus makes a rough road for the reader, but scholars of Mormon and 19th-century American history will find their labors well repaid.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Susan Sessions Rugh
In the winter after the martyrdom of her sons, Joseph and Hyrum, Lucy Mack Smith dictated a history of her family to Martha Jane Knowlton Coray, a sympathetic schoolteacher in Nauvoo. Two copies were made of the manuscript: one was published as Biographical Sketches by Apostle Orson Pratt in 1853 in the Millennial Star, and the other went to Utah where Brigham Young suppressed it in 1865. Ostensibly he quashed it because Mother Smith's memory was faulty, but more likely it was because Lucy argued that prophetic succession was through the Smith family line. In the next decades George A. Smith and Elias Smith edited and revised the text to reflect the preferences of the LDS hierarchy. Not until 1901 when the RLDS threat was no longer serious did the church allow the publication of the serialized document in the Improvement Era. The 1901 version is the one with which most Mormons are familiar, compiled and edited in 1945 by Preston Nibley and still in print. More recent attempts to restore the original text have been incomplete: Dan Vogel published a portion of the narrative in Early Mormon Documents, and Scott Facer Proctor and Maurine Jensen Proctor edited The Revised and Enhanced History of Joseph Smith by His Mother (Bookcraft 1996), excising some material and standardizing spelling and punctuation.

With all these versions available, why the need for Lucy's Book? Jan Shipps, who has praised Lucy Smith's history as "a rare and valuable firsthand account provided by an observer closely connected to the primary participants in the early development of the Mormon movement," argues that the reliability of the 1853 edition rests upon its concordance with the original 1845 Coray manuscript.¹ Lucy's Book "is the first one-volume history to arrange the earliest known manuscript source of the text Lucy dictated in 1844-45 with the version printed in England in 1853 by Apostle Orson Pratt" (16). The two documents are arranged in parallel columns, augmented by notes based upon a "fair copy" of the manuscript by Howard Coray (although Anderson states that the number of corrections is "surprisingly small" [16]). Before turning to the document, shrewd readers will study the chart on page 218, which lays out the genealogy of the manuscript. Lucy's narrative is divided into six parts, generally corresponding to the locales of the story; it begins with Smith and Mack family genealogies and ends with the assassination of Lucy's sons, Hyrum and Joseph. A fine introductory essay by Irene Bates sketches the life of Lucy Smith in her historical context. Miscellaneous letters and poems are gathered into a short appendix, followed by a brief epilogue and biographical summaries.

More to the point is Anderson's extensive essay on the history of the text, accompanied by a detailed chronology extending from 1732 to 2001. She concludes that while the Young-directed revisions of the text were not maliciously made, she finds it "unpleasant to see him sneer at a faithful mother of twelve who donated her time and sacrificed her economic well-being, dismissing her as a sensation-seeking would-be novelist" (132). Clearly, this editor's sympathies lie with Lucy Smith, not Brigham Young. Using Howard Coray's "fair copy," Anderson argues that the revised manuscript differs materially from Lucy's writings: the Pratt publication omitted about ten percent of the rough draft, and twenty-eight percent of the words in the 1853 publication were not present in Lucy's draft. She cites relevant passages of the text to demonstrate the vitality and richness of Lucy's narration and, thus, makes a strong case for returning to Lucy's draft in this impeccably detailed version.

This volume is a summary achievement, recognized by the Best Book Award from the John Whitmer Historical Association and the Best Documentary Book Award from the Mormon History Association. Only someone like Anderson possesses the editorial skills and attention to detail to present the document fairly in its complicated versions. But Lucy's Book does much more than faithfully reproduce "Mormonism's first female autobiography" (11); it supplies us with an interpretation that enhances our understanding of a woman, a family, and a religious movement in its formative years. By foregrounding Lucy and paying attention to the meanings of gender, this book makes a contribution not only to Mormon history, but to the history of American religion. Now that we have a text we can trust, the way is open for reliable scholarly treatments of issues like female spirituality, motherhood, and women in early American religion.

In sum, mass market versions of the History simply cannot measure up to the reliability of Lucy's Book. Scholars and serious Mormon history aficionados will want this version on their shelves. Finally, it is time to let Lucy speak for herself.
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NOTES:

1. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 92.