Eleanor Lord Pray. Selected Letters, 1894-1906

Vladivostok: The Rubezh Press of the Pacific, 2012. — 290 p.The talented and perceptive American woman Eleanor Lord Pray (1868-1954) arrived in Vladivostok with her husband, a businessman, from New England in June 1894, and lived here until mid-December 1930. All these years, practically every day and often several times per day, Mrs. Pray wrote and sent letters to her correspondents in the United States, Europe, and China. For a wonder, her relatives kept many of these letters in their attics, and eventually her granddaughter Patricia Dunn Silver, who lives in Florida, organized and safeguarded the Eleanor Lord Pray Collection. A hundred years later another American woman, Birgitta Ingemanson, a Siavicist and a great friend of our city, created the distinctive documentary epic Letters from Vladivostok from this unique Vladivostok epistolary legacy, putting together excerpts from Eleanor Pray's letters into nine thematic chapters.
First published by the Rubezh Press of the Pacific in 2008, Letters became a bestseller and was reissued in a second edition in 2010. Now, on the threshold of the APEC Summit (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) which will be held in Vladivostok in 2012, the Rubezh Press of the Pacific is publishing a first volume of Selected Letters by Eleanor Lord Pray. Here, some of her letters from 1894-1906,
rich in experiences and narrative detail, are included chronologically and in full.