| An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands: Letters of Carrie Prudence Winter, 1890-1893 Subjects: Winter Carrie Prudence 1866–1942 -- Correspondence; Women missionaries -- Hawaii -- Correspondence; Missions -- Educational work -- Hawaii; Hawaii -- History -- To 1893; When twenty-three-year-old Carrie Prudence Winter caught her first glimpse of Honolulu from aboard the Zealandia in October 1890, she had "never seen anything so beautiful." She had been traveling for two months since leaving her family home in Connecticut and was at last only a few miles from her final destination, Kawaiaha'o Female Seminary, a flourishing boarding school for Hawaiian girls. As the daughter of staunch New England Congregationalists, Winter had dreamed of being a missionary teacher as a child and reasoned that "teaching for a few years among the Sandwich Islands seemed particularly attractive" while her fiancé pursued a science degree. During her three years at Kawaiaha'o, Winter wrote often and at length to her "beloved Charlie"; her lively and affectionate letters provide readers with not only an intimate look at nineteenth-century courtship, but many invaluable details about life in Hawai'i during the last years of the monarchy and a young woman's struggle to enter a career while adjusting to surroundings that were unlike anything she had ever experienced. Bonura Sandra E. : Sandra E. Bonura lives in Southern California and teaches in higher education. Her two previously published works emanating from primary sources were An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands: The Letters of Carrie Prudence Winter (1890-1893) (2012) and "Lydia K. Aholo--Her Story, Recovering the Lost Voice," from volume 47 of The Hawaiian Journal of History (2013). |