Outland

Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) was one of the early nature writers of the American Southwest. Her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the flora, fauna and people, as well as evoking the mysticism and spirituality, of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California. She was born in Carlinville, Illinois, the fourth of six children, and graduated from Blackburn College in 1888. Her family moved to California in the same year, establishing a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley. She married Stafford Wallace Austin in 1891 and for 17 years made a special study of Indian life in the Mojave Desert, the intimate knowledge she had thus acquired evident in all her publications. She was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, as well as an early feminist and defender of Native American and Spanish-American rights. Around 1907 she joined the art colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea where she co-founded the Forest Theatre which premiered several of her plays, and she was involved in all aspects of Carmel's bohemian society. When she later moved to Santa Fe she helped to establish the Santa Fe Little Theatre and was active in preserving the local culture of New Mexico, founding the Spanish Colonial Arts Society with artist Frank Applegate in 1925. Her novel Outland (1919) is a Lost Race tale set deep in the mountains of southern California where a civilisation known as Outland has established an arcadian Utopia, threatened by a long feud with the Far-Folk. The principles espoused by the Outliers show the influence of William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890).