A Girl of the Limberlost is an odd, uneven book. There are a couple of subplots that pop up briefly and then drop away, and the second half of the book doesn't quite seem to fit with the first - it's about the same characters and place, but the focus changes.
But for all its imperfections I did enjoy it. I liked Elnora a lot: I'm often a little suspicious when the author introduces a main character with the clear intention that we're going to admire her (or him, as the case may be), because I find often the author is cheating in that character's favor, but Stratton-Porter never needs to cheat for Elnora.
I think Anne - the book as a whole, not perhaps poor Anne herself - would be a marvelous book for a course about Toxic Femininity in Literature or something like that. Woolson both dislikes traditional femininity and buys into it as a moral imperative, which means the female characters are damned whether they comply with it or not.
The worst part is that I think the book would actually be fairly solid if Woolson could just refrain from editorializing. She's good at sketching characters, but then she has to tell you how to react to them and how they illustrate the various faults of womankind and she shoots herself in the foot every time.
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Date: 2016-04-20 03:22 pm (UTC)But for all its imperfections I did enjoy it. I liked Elnora a lot: I'm often a little suspicious when the author introduces a main character with the clear intention that we're going to admire her (or him, as the case may be), because I find often the author is cheating in that character's favor, but Stratton-Porter never needs to cheat for Elnora.
I think Anne - the book as a whole, not perhaps poor Anne herself - would be a marvelous book for a course about Toxic Femininity in Literature or something like that. Woolson both dislikes traditional femininity and buys into it as a moral imperative, which means the female characters are damned whether they comply with it or not.
The worst part is that I think the book would actually be fairly solid if Woolson could just refrain from editorializing. She's good at sketching characters, but then she has to tell you how to react to them and how they illustrate the various faults of womankind and she shoots herself in the foot every time.