Foote's additional talents as an illustrator gained her prestigious commissions as well as an appointment as juror for an art competition at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
These hallmarks of literary and artistic achievement, however, were not enough to secure Foote a place in more recent American literary criticism. Following her death in 1938, her work received little attention until 1971, when Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose, based upon Foote's then-unpublished memoir, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1972), generated renewed interest in the forgotten author. Foote scholar Mary Ellen Williams Walsh has recently documented the extent to which Stegner relied on the memoirs for his own plots, characters, and descriptions; many passages in his novel are indeed lifted directly from the memoirs. That Stegner was able to borrow so much original material from Foote in order to secure his own literary reputation is suggestive of the extent to which her skill as a writer has not been adequately recognized.
The youngest of four children, Mary Anna Hallock was born on 19 November 1847 to Quaker parents, Nathaniel and Ann Burling Hallock, on a farm near Milton, New York.
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