The premise of Angle of Repose is that Susan Burling’s marriage to Oliver Ward was no picnic. It’s a sad narrative without the pleasures and high spirits of a picnic.
According to her grandson Lyman Ward, who writes her life story, Susan Burling’s marriage to Oliver Ward was no picnic. She gave up a promising career as an illustrator in New York when she married Oliver, a mining engineer and followed him west to New Almaden, a barely civilized mining town in California. As with many women, Susan willingly subsumed her life into her husband’s, but not without deep feelings of regret. “Poor Grandmother.” Lyman surmises, “She might have lived an idyll in her honeymoon cottage in the picnic West if her heart had not bled eastward.”
*The angle of repose denotes the steepest angle of the slope of an inclined plane, such as a pile of dirt, before it begins to lose its stability. Stegner uses the term as a metaphor for Susan Ward’s ability to keep herself intact and stable in the face of adversity.
None of the many book jackets for this novel alludes to the title. This is the first edition cover.
The novel is partly based on Mary Hallock Foote’s memoirs and letters (unpublished). New Almaden is 12 miles south of San Jose. It was a chief source of mercury in the U.S. beginning in 1845.
See Wallace Stegner. Angle of Repose. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1971; Mary Hallock Foote. A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West the Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote. edited by Rodman W. Paul. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1972.