Volume 1 “Winter Quarters The 1846-1848 Life Writings of Mary Haskin Parker Richards” ed. Maurine Carr Ward
Volume 2 “Mormon Midwife The 1846-1888 Diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions” ed. Donna Toland Smart
Volume 3 “The History of Louisa Barnes Pratt The Autobiography of a Mormon Missionary Widow and Pioneer” ed. S. George Ellsworth
Volume 4 “Out of the Black Patch The Autobiography of Effie Marquess Carmack, Folk Musician, Artist, and Writer” ed. Noel A. Carmack and Karen Lynn Davidson
Volume 5 “The Personal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow” Maureen Ursenbach Beecher
Volume 6 “A Widow’s Tale 1884-1896 Diary of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney” ed. Charles M. Hatch and Todd Compton
Volume 7 “No Place to Call Home The 1807-1857 Life Writings of Caroline Barnes Crosby, Chronicler of Outlying Mormon Communities” ed. Edward Leo Lyman, Susan Ward Payne, and George S. Ellsworth editors
and the upcoming (Spring 2006) Volume 8 “Recolections of Past Days: The Autobiography of Patience Loader Rozsa Archer” ed. Sandra Petree

“A Woman’s View: Helen Mar Whitney’s Reminiscences of Early Church History”, ed. Jeni Broberg Holzapfel & Richard Neitzel Holzapfel
“Lucy’s Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir”, ed. Lavina Fielding Anderson
“Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah” by Claudia L. Bushman
“Sister Saints” by Vicky Burgess-Olson
“Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900″ Kenneth W. Godfrey, Audrey M. Godfrey, Jill Mulvay Derr.

Many of the books listed are the original sources from which Compton put together “In Sacred Loneliness”. The original sources make for better reading, are in context, unembellished and undistorted by Compton’s pen. For those who believe Compton did a good job with ISL, I strongly recommend they look up the original sources.

Another LDS biography of sorts you may want to take note of is Women of Nauvoo by Richard and Jeni Holzapfel.

/scans bookcase.

I think you’re relatively well covered as far as full-length treatments go.

Add to the growing list: Portions of Bushman, Mormon Sisters; portions of Godfrey & Derr, Women’s Voices; Smith & Thatcher, Heroines of the Restoration (which includes a selection _by_ Ardeth Greene Kapp!).

On the Eliza front, Beecher has a volume of her writings.

And don’t leave out Sunbonnet Sisters!

Adam–

I think I will get no disagreement from you when I note that men and women are given different roles. It should not be surprising, then, that women might be interested in reading about how exemplary women have gone about fulfilling those roles. I’ll admit to peering through the lines of the many biographies of prophets that I have read for insight into how their mothers and wives lived their lives. But there isn’t much there. To me, this isn’t some crass form of scorekeeping (you’ll notice that I make no reference to the authors’ gender–I can honestly say that until right now I hadn’t thought about it, and I don’t think it matters). But it is not unreasonable that LDS women might want more templates in print of how some faithful women have gone about fulfilling their roles.

The existence of a biography is, I think, also a metric of how interesting or valuable or worth recording the person’s life story was/is. To that extent, the lack of biographies of LDS women suggests that somewhere (whether the choice was primarily by the authors, publishers, or readers, or some combination), there’s been the sense that women’s lives weren’t worth writing/reading. That’s a tragedy.

(And I didn’t say that the book would _only_ be of interest to readers interested in women’s issues, but rather I identified them as an audience that would have a _particular_ interest in the book.)

But in those faraway units we count women, converts, who have given their life to build up the Kingdom, remained in their homeland as asked, and many who are doing it now, while little or nothing is being recorded of their achievements. Years ago there was an oral history endeavor emanating from SLC, where older members were interviewed, but I haven’t heard of any results of that project, nor of any ongoing work in that sense. Moreover, it seems the gathering of written material has been overlooked, and so every year valuable material is lost. Sorry to whine, but perhaps someone who could help change things is reading this…

DKL, I didn’t deliberately leave off _ISL_; I’m embarrassed to admit that I forgot it (I just read it last month!!). While the coverage of polygamy might be troublesome to some, the biographies are superb. I also didn’t consider autobiographies at all, but I enjoyed _A Mormon Mother_.