Review: Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and David M. Whitchurch, eds. My Dear Sister: Letters Between Joseph F. Smith and his Sister Martha Ann Smith Harris. Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2019.

Authors

Natalie Rose

Keywords

letters, Joseph F Smith, Martha Anna Harris, history

Abstract

decades of letters exchanged between the sixth church president and his sister from the 1850s to the 1910s. A majority of these letters are provided by Carole Call King, the great-granddaughter of Martha Ann Harris, who had the well-preserved letters in her possession. Following her father’s death in 1993, King inherited several items from her father including these letters that remained in a box left “on a closet shelf ” in her home for some time (xiv). In the box were almost one hundred letters written to her great-grandmother Martha Ann Harris by Harris’s brother Joseph F. Smith, the nephew of Joseph Smith and one of the most influential Latter- day Saint leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Included in one of these letters was a lock of Smith’s hair, which he sent to his sister during his first proselytizing mission abroad to Hawaii. Whereas many readers will likely be drawn to this collection to understand how Smith expressed himself in intimate writing to his beloved sister, this comprehensive collection is also a masterful model of how to employ epistolary historical analysis within the contexts of religious, familial, and material history.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Rose, Natalie (2020) "Review: Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and David M. Whitchurch, eds. My Dear Sister: Letters Between Joseph F. Smith and his Sister Martha Ann Smith Harris. Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2019.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 7: No. 1, Article 24.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol7/iss1/24