14000 miles, a carriage and two women — Reading Notes

A Voice of Practical Defiance

Howe’s prose is marked by a blend of practicality and mild rebellion. She records the “protestations of the towns-people and the remarks of Madam Grundy” that two women traveling alone was neither proper nor prudent, yet she and her companion proceed anyway. This tension between social expectation and personal freedom recurs throughout the excerpts. The author does not dwell on feminist argument; instead, she lets the simple fact of the journey—and her unapologetic reporting of it—carry the point. Her language is direct and unpretentious, as when she notes that they “take our lives in our hands, and ‘do the trip’ in a large comfortable, roomy buggy.” The scare quotes around “do the trip” suggest a wry awareness of how their adventure might be viewed, while the emphasis on comfort and roominess grounds the narrative in tangible, practical concerns.

Weather as a Character

Weather is not merely backdrop in these pages; it is a constant, shaping presence that Howe describes with precision and a touch of humor. She notes “dense fogs along the Connecticut in September” that are “the salvation of vegetation from frosts” but “fatal to views.” Rain turns roads “like rivers,” and a drive can be “one of those ‘cosy’ drives” precisely because it is pouring. The author tracks shifts in weather with the eye of someone who must plan each day’s travel around it: “A new kind of weather was on hand next morning, strangely like that we have become accustomed to, but not so hopeless.” She even coins the term “canned sunshine” for the memory of a bright day stored up against gray ones. This attention to atmospheric detail gives the narrative a sensory immediacy and reveals the author’s intimate knowledge of the landscapes she traverses.

Encounters with People and Places

Howe’s travelogue is populated with brief, vivid encounters. She describes a hotel in Norwich, Vermont, that feels like a private home, with “the fire crackling under the high old mantel” and a “fan-decorated music-room through the portieres.” The “very gallant colored boy” who shows them to a room “the size of the parlor below” is noted without comment, a detail that reflects the casual racial attitudes of the era. Elsewhere, she meets a party of travelers who “declared they had laughed more than if it had been pleasant” despite a ruined Derby hat. These snapshots of fellow travelers and local characters are rendered with a reporter’s eye for the telling detail, but Howe rarely lingers; she moves on, as the journey itself does. The cumulative effect is a mosaic of New England and Canadian life at the turn of the century, seen from the seat of a phaeton.

Structure and Serial Origins

The book’s structure is directly shaped by its origins as a series of newspaper letters. Each chapter covers a distinct journey or season, and the narrative often begins in medias res with a reference to a previous letter or a specific date. The foreword explains that the letters were written “for the Boston Evening Transcript some years ago, and the later letters for the Leominster Daily Enterprise,” and that they “cover an unbroken series of summer and autumn journeys.” This serial format explains the book’s episodic quality: there is no single arc, but rather a repeating pattern of departure, travel, and return. The author occasionally addresses her readers directly, as in the opening quotation, creating a sense of ongoing correspondence. The result is a work that feels less like a polished memoir and more like a collection of dispatches from the road, preserving the spontaneity and immediacy of the original letters.

Readers approaching 14000 Miles, a Carriage and Two Women should expect not a continuous narrative but a series of linked episodes, each with its own weather, roads, and chance encounters. Howe’s voice is consistent—practical, observant, and quietly determined—but the book rewards dipping into individual chapters as much as reading straight through. Pay attention to the small details: the condition of the roads, the quality of the inns, the author’s offhand remarks about social norms. These are the threads that bind the journey together, and they reveal as much about the traveler as about the places she passes through.

There’s a particular peace in reading about someone moving slowly through a landscape, the miles measured in hoofbeats and weather. Frances Howe’s unhurried carriage days brought back the quiet hush of an old summer afternoon. Later, I found the same feeling in this A History of the Comstock Silver Lode & Mines Nevada and the Great Basin Region; Lake Tahoe and the High Sierras — Reading Notes, those dusty miles just sitting there, patient, waiting.