While we as readers might wish to know the inner goings on of Emma with greater certainty, Reeder’s honesty in this regard is refreshing. The word “may” appears time and again: Emma may have been thinking this or she may have been feeling that. Reeder is careful to separate her speculation (based on her expertise and the historical record) from what is actually documented. Rather than a traditional, origins-to-legacy biography, Reeder opts for a thematic approach, taking the reader through each of Emma’s major roles in her life and in the early Church: her marriage to Joseph Smith, her mothering both of her own children and serving as a mother figure to many other children in the community, her business experience and political activism, her roles as the first “presidentess” of the Church’s women’s organization (the Relief Society), the first scribe to Joseph Smith’s scriptural translations, and the assembler of the Church’s first hymnal (and at least two more hymnals after that). Despite the fact that Emma left much less of a written record than her spouse (“Emma did not leave a journal or even much correspondence”), Reeder plumbs the depths of what record there is to paint a rich portrait - in Emma’s own words wherever possible - of a woman who was the “first” in many roles in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the title of the book implies. Reeder isn’t blind to Emma’s flaws, but neither does she judge. Emma Smith was a remarkable woman, and Reeder clearly feels a deep affection for her subject, despite their chronological separation of roughly one and a half centuries.
I wish she did have the time! Jennifer Reeder’s biography of Emma Smith - First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith - left me wanting even more of Emma’s words. “I have many more things I could like to write but have not time.” Thus wrote Emma Smith in a letter to her husband, Joseph Smith.
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