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Ann Eliza Webb Young, the one-time plural wife of Brigham Young, has not been invisible in either her time or our own. The 1875 publication of her autobiography, Wife No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage, Being a Complete Exposé of Mormonism, and Revealing the Sorrows, Sacrifices and Sufferings of Women in Polygamy, caused a furor, and for a decade Young kept her name in the public eye by going on the lecture circuit. In 1908, she revised Wife No. 19, adding new material and giving the volume a new tide: Life in Mormon Bondage; a Complete Exposé of Its False Prophets, Murderous Danites, Despotic Rulers and Hypnotized, Deluded Subjects. More recendy, she has been the subject of Irving Wallace's extensive biography, The Twenty-Seventh Wife, and the newly released novel by David Ebershoff, The 19th Wife.
Yet her years as Brigham Young's fifty-second wife and, apparentiy, his nine- teenth living wife (the total number of his wives is believed to be fifty-five, but may be as high as seventy), her civil suit for divorce from him, her repudiation of Mormonism, and her meteoric success on the lecture circuit have hitherto overshadowed her contributions to American literature.1 With this Profile, I hope to begin the recovery of Ann Eliza Webb Young as an orator and writer for three reasons. First, she played a role in her era's important cultural circuits, such as the lecture platform. Second, her decision to cast her life story in the familiar form of the captivity narrative further expands the definition of that genre at the same time that it gives readers insight (however biased) into Mormon culture. And last, her three marriages and divorces foreground the contradictions of marriage, chastity, and womanhood during the intense nineteenth-century debates on "the woman question."
Ann Eliza Webb was born in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844, the youngest child of Mormon converts Chauncey G. and Eliza Webb. After the revelation of plural, or "celestial," marriage in 1843, Joseph Smith himself instructed Chauncey Webb to take another wife. Accordingly, when the Webbs left Nauvoo for Utah in 1846, the family consisted of Chauncey, his two wives, and four children. In the autobiographies, Ann Eliza describes what it was like growing up in such a...