The Echo of My Days: The Lost Stories and Poems of Bessie Smith Stanton
Paperback, $22.00
Published June 2024
BESSIE’S STORY
Bessie Stanton’s writings had been packed away and forgotten in an unmarked cardboard box for many decades. Then in 2022, while going through stacks of old family letters and documents, which went back nearly two centuries, her grandson came upon this remarkable family treasure that has now been lovingly transcribed from scores of fragile and faded handwritten originals.
Bessie was the daughter of a Quaker minister, the youngest of five children and was raised on her father’s farm in southern Ohio. After her active and enriching high school years she attended Wilmington Quaker College in Wilmington, Ohio where she grew into an accomplished young woman studying art, music, drama and literature. And she learned to write- which turned into a lifelong passion.
The stories are fun and entertaining with tantalizing twists of plot. The playful wit and colorful imagery within each piece is a delight. The poems and sonnets reveal the deepest pleasures of all her years and also the heartbreaking pain. Her unique and captivating style is that of a writer who truly loved and honored language and used it candidly and honestly on every page.
The Echo of My Days is the culmination of Bessie Smith Stanton’s literary creativity. It was her dream – not realized while she lived – that her writings would find readers. Now, with this book her dream has come true