Exposé of Polygamy

A Lady's Life Among the Mormons

Fanny Stenhouse, Linda DeSimone

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780874217148
• Print ISBN:
  9780874217131
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies

After the 1872 publication of Exposé,Fanny Stenhouse became a celebrity in the cultural wars between Mormons and much of America. An English convert, she had grown disillusioned with the Mormon Church and polygamy, which her husband practiced before associating with a circle of dissident Utah intellectuals and merchants. Stenhouse's critique of plural marriage, Brigham Young, and Mormonism was also a sympathetic look at Utah's people and honest recounting of her life. She later created a new edition, titled "Tell It All," which ensured her notoriety in Utah and popularity elsewhere but turned her thoughtful memoir into a more polemical, true exposé of Polygamy. Since 1874, it has stayed in print, in multiple, varying editions. The original book, meanwhile, is less known, though more readable. Tracing the literary history of Stenhouse's important piece of Americana, Linda DeSimone rescues an important autobiographical and historical record from the baggage notoriety brought to it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION Reckoning with Fanny Stenhouse
• TO THE READER.
• CONTENTS.
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CHAPTER I.
• CHAPTER II.
• CHAPTER III.
• CHAPTER IV.
• CHAPTER V.
• CHAPTER VI.
• CHAPTER VII.
• CHAPTER VIII.
• CHAPTER IX.
• CHAPTER X.
• CHAPTER XI.
• CHAPTER XII.
• CHAPTER XIII.
• CHAPTER XIV.
• CHAPTER XV.
• CHAPTER XVI.
• CHAPTER XVII.
• CHAPTER XVIII.
• CHAPTER XIX.
• CHAPTER XX.
• APPENDIX.
• EPILOGUE The 1872 Exposé of Polygamy Compared with the 1874 “Tell It All”
• APPENDIX List of Editions
• Notes
• Index