Klondike Women: True Tales of the 1897-1898 Gold Rush Book

There's something about reading other women's anger, feeling other women's pain, and cackling over other women's exacting of revenge that can be just so goddamn cathartic.

Hell Hath No Fury is at once fun and sobering, a rich trove of snapshots of women's lives and the men who have done them wrong (or were otherwise unsatisfactory), and gives those of us interested in and concerned about it a cultural-anthropological peek into patriarchy and class within certain demographics over the centuries. I've not read every single letter, but I like to crack it open when I'm feeling in need of by-proxy venting, or to have some romantic heartstring pulled, or simply out of the morbid curiosity that fuels lust for gossip.

It's a nice rainy-day (or really any-day) casual reader and would make for a great gift between girlfriends or feminist academic colleagues.

Edit: For those who found difficulty empathizing with the writers for not knowing who they were and felt a bit robbed by the lack of detailed information in the backstory snippets, it really pays to do a little cursory research while reading this--or anything! Googling a name can be pretty revealing, and it can add a lot more substance to one's personal read-through of this collection. There are also reviews finding the letters to be boring, and I assume the majority of these reviewers find particular interest in the shock value and glamour of reality TV; if one is looking for a lot of fast-paced vitriol and vindictiveness within this, one will probably not find it. There are a couple with these qualities, and they're pretty shocking, but on the whole, the messages within a lot of these letters are very subtle and exceptionally artful. One phenomenal example of this is Anne of Cleves' divorce letter to Henry VIII. Appreciation of letters like this requires some historical knowledge and understanding of the political climate at the time, who these people were, the nuances and customs of speech as well as, as an example, what languages Anne and Henry might have originally and most often communicated in, as then the reader will know from what language this letter was originally translated into English.

So, perhaps this collection isn't for everyone, but for those it's for, it's bound to be valuable.