2000 Indiana University hardcover edition. Light reading wear, some highlighting and a little annotation to text else good condition.

From the dustjacket: Written between 1867 and 1879, this memoir by the most prominent woman of the younger generation at the Oneida Community is the first that deals explicitly and openly with the sexual conflicts there. It chronicles Tirzah Miller's social and sexual life, including her relations with her uncle and lover, founder of the colony John H. Noyes, and her participation in the eugenic experiment Noyes dubbed 'stirpiculture.' Miller was a sensitive observer of the internal life of this celebrated communal family, and she details the shifting political forces within the community just prior to its breakup in 1880. Her memoir is full of intimate conversations with John H. Noyes about issues and personalities, about her love affairs, about her doubts about communism and her love of music, and her anguish over the loss of two partners. Throughout the memoir she is torn by her desire for romance and her duty to the community.

The memoir, which begins when she is twenty and ends when she is thirty-six, sheds light on several key issues that are central to understanding this daring experiment in communal living and social engineering: free love and incest, or 'consanguinity' as it was called in the community; the conflict between Tirzah's commitment to her mentor Noyes

and another 'special lover'; Tirzah's religious life and her understanding of Perfectionism; and the forces that led to the restructuring of the society and the abandonment of 'complex marriage.'

Tirzah's memoir reveals a woman at the vital center of the community, a 'magnetic force' who enthusiastically embraced Noyes's program to spawn a new breed of Perfectionists. It is among the most remarkable pieces of confessional writing in American literature.