The author, Evelyn M.H., was a young Englishwoman who accompanied her husband and his two brothers to California in 1885. Ranch life in California (1886) is based on her letters home, beginning with her Atlantic voyage and a cross-country rail trip to San Francisco. There the party purchases a ranch at Lower Lake in Burns Valley, where they find a sizable English community. Evelyn describes her introduction to the life of a farm wife while her husband and his brothers (all former stockbrokers) learn to be farmers over the next eighteen months.
