A Spirit to Resist

Rose M. Hall's first novel is a historical fiction based on the early life of the Texas pioneer woman, Elizabeth Ellen Gething, whom the author admired from her childhood. In 1896, Lady Elizabeth Gething, a fashionable, well-born, and educated Victorian young woman elopes and emigrates to the Texas Panhandle with husband Arthur Edward Gething who had been a barrister at Queen's Court, London. By 1896, he had established himself on a section of land he had won in a poker game in Fort Worth, Texas. He promises his bride a fine house and staff when she arrives, but she finds a ramshackle one-room shack. She never wears the elegant ball gowns in her trousseau that she brings to entertain her husbands' business and professional friends and their families. Thereby hangs this story, A SPIRIT TO RESIST. It is her story of surviving and thriving on the arid, harsh Great Plains in the United States.