Read the beginning of the Introduction from A Summer to Be: A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland by Isabel Garland Lord, edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin:

"Readers who come to A Summer to Be because of an interest in Hamlin Garland will discover a fascinating side of the writer that he never revealed in his eight volumes of autobiography—the intensely-loving, domineering father whose deep love for his eldest daughter led him to change the trajectory of his career even as that love impeded his daughter's independence. Garland was ill equipped by temperament for marriage and fatherhood, to which he came late, marrying in 1899 at age thirty-nine. He had spent his adulthood in almost incessant travel as he fulfilled lecture engagements and indulged his own wanderlust by exploring the West, by visiting the goldfields in the Yukon, and by journeying to England to meet the authors with whom he had been corresponding. As he entered his fourth decade, he found it difficult to break his solitary habits and enter the inevitable compromises of marriage and family life. Though he was a devoted father who spared no effort to ease the passage into adulthood of his two daughters, Mary Isabel, born in 1903, and Constance, born in 1907, his fatherly guidance was as often overbearing as it was loving—as Isabel (who dropped her first name in her late teens) amply illustrates in her memoir.

But A Summer to Be, which Isabel had originally titled "This Loving Daughter," is valuable in its own right as a story of a girl brought up in the shadow of her father's famous friends, enjoying all the advantages of celebrity even as she rebelled against her father's loving domination. Garland had a talent for forming friendships, and in their childhood his daughters played with the children of Solomon Guggenheim, the founder of the famed art museum; Ira Nelson Morris, Chicago financier and later U.S. envoy to Sweden; and Ernest Thompson Seton, naturalist and co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America. As teenagers, the Garland girls met Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and A. A. Milne; and as adults they formed friendships with the actors Walter Hampden, John Barrymore, and Walter Pidgeon. While Constance inherited an artistic ability from her mother, Isabel inherited her father's talent for writing. In her memoir, which begins with her earliest memories, Isabel charmingly describes her encounters with these and many other writers and actors as she honestly and movingly weaves a story of her own coming of age that is also a snapshot of American literary culture of the first decades of the twentieth century. Part memoir and part autobiography, A Summer to Be records a daughter's gradual emergence from her devoted and possessive father; it is a story full of moments of revelation and intrigue, betrayal and guilt, and ultimately the joy of self-discovery."

Isabel Garland Lord (1904–88) had a stage and lecture-circuit career and produced a half-dozen books, several stage plays, and a musical. Keith Newlin is a professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is the author of Hamlin Garland: A Life (Nebraska 2008). Victoria Doyle-Jones, Lord’s second niece, enjoyed a long career in support of science education, including serving as CEO of the University of California’s White Mountain Research Station facilities. Now retired, she is involved in a variety of volunteer projects.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase A Summer to Be, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Summer-to-Be,674617.aspx.