When I was ten, I read a novel called A Girl of the Limberlost that made a deep impression on me. I assumed that its author, Gene Stratton-Porter, was a man, and gave the matter no further thought. I read the book, written in 1909, at a small New Hampshire girls’ camp—run by an elderly Congregationalist minister and his wife and itself past its prime—curled up on a worn velvet sofa in an outbuilding called the Lodge, whose walls were hung with Indian blankets and sepia photographs of girls in togas doing eurythmic dances in a forest clearing. It was 1944, and civilian America was undergoing a regimen of wartime austerity by which it was never more than mildly discommoded, but that imparted a sort of scratchy gray wool feel to the atmosphere. The lack of gas and the rationing of meat touched us campers—we had to walk the three and a half miles to the lake where we swam, and we ate a lot of creamed codfish—but did not register on us as deprivations.
The above is the beginning of Janet Malcolm’s fascinating essay about Gene Stratton-Porter, in the latest New York Review of Books. This is not the first time I’ve come across someone waxing nostalgic enthusiasm for Girl of the Limberlost. My impression was this was a book in the same vein as Anne of Green Gables and I always thought I should find it and read it, so warmly did people speak of it. The book is avalaible here to read in its entirety, but after reading Malcolm’s essay I’m not sure if I want to or not.
(via Paper Cuts)
educating alice 