71. Gene Stratton-Porter — A Girl of the Limberlost with Sadie Stein

AMY HELMES: Hi, everyone! Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to unearthing forgotten classics by women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner of 15 years and our show's co-host, Kim Askew. 

KIM ASKEW: Hey everybody! Today, we're back with another lost classic we definitely think deserves a spot on your to-read pile. It's A Girl of the Limberlost, and it's by the once bestselling novelist and McCall's magazine columnist, Gene Stratton Porter. This is the book that made her famous, and by famous I'm talking about at their peak in 1910, her novels attracted an estimated 50 million readers. 

AMY: Even by today's standards, that's huge! So Kim, you know how much I love Smithsonian magazine, right? I'm a subscriber. Well, that's where I first heard about Gene Stratton Porter. There was an article written by Kathryn Aalto that compared Stratton Porter's popularity to that of J.K. Rowling today. Between 1917 and 1948, there were something like 21 film adaptations of her works, including several adaptations of the book we'll be discussing today. It is strange. And I mean that as a compliment. 

KIM: Yes. If you can't tell, we are very excited because here with us to discuss this strange book is previous Lost Ladies of Lit guest Sadie Stein. She was on the podcast last spring to talk about Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy high school books. And if you want to go back and listen to that, it was episode 35. We had the best. It turns out Amy and Sadie happened to be reading A Girl of the Limberlost at the same time. We started nerding out about how weird the book is, and of course, the three of us decided to reunite for another episode. We do have a few minor spoiler alerts in this episode. We don't out and out say what happens, but if you'd rather wait until you have read the book, you might want to come back and listen to this episode later.

AMY: If there's anyone I would want to discuss moth hunting with -- that's the hobby of the main character of today's book -- it's definitely Sadie Stein. So let's raid the hopefully not moth eaten stacks and get started!

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AMY: Our returning guest, Sadie Stein, is a New York-based culture writer and editor, and her essays have been published in Elle magazine T magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times among many others. She has her own book curation business, SOS Libraries, and she recently wrote the preface for the new Persephone edition of The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Canfield Fisher was the subject of our eighth and ninth episodes last fall, so feel free to go back and check those out. Anyway, welcome back to the shows, Sadie! 

SADIE STEIN: I'm so delighted to be here. Thank you for having me. 

KIM: It's so fitting that you're returning for this episode, Sadie, because there are some interesting similarities between Gene Stratton Porter and Maud Hart Lovelace. To begin with both the authors are from the Midwest. Stratton Porter is from Indiana, while Hart Lovelace is from Minnesota and A Girl of the Limberlost and the Betsy-Tacy high school books are both coming of age books featuring female protagonists. Both are also set around the first decade of the 20th century. And both authors use their childhoods as inspiration for their novels.

AMY: Yeah, but A Girl of the Limberlost is a bit darker than Lovelace's childhood books. In fact, when I was reading it, I was like, "I don't know that this is a kid's book." We can get into that. 

KIM: Yeah. And coming into it, I did not know at all what to expect. I really knew nothing about it other than you both had said it was weird. I'd heard Gene Stratton Porter's name, but I didn't know anything about her. Sadie, do you remember how you were introduced to Stratton Porter and what made you decide to read A Girl of the Limberlost? 

SADIE: Oh yeah, I read it from a young age because it was a favorite of my grandfather's. His mother had grown up in Wabash County in the Limberlost area and would have been around the age of the Elnora Comstock character. And she had moved away in her youth to Arkansas for the rest of her life, and, I think, really idealized her childhood in Indiana and passed that onto her kids. And so that book was a great favorite of my grandfather and all his siblings. So I grew up reading it. I guess I was probably a little young to read it because as you say, it's really lurid and quite bizarre. It's very intense. People are constantly panting to express how upset or passionate they are. All their dialogue is panted. It comes into play 200 times in the book. I've done the word search on it. It's so odd, and it just goes to show how kind of overwrought a lot of the tone of this novel is.

AMY: Yes. I was thinking about this last night and the phrase that came to mind was "Indiana soap opera." 

KIM: Totally. It's very dramatic and lush, and then there's like the swampy stuff and yeah, it kind of all goes together. 

AMY: So let's just jump into sort of who Gene Stratton Porter was. She was born Geneva Grace Stratton in 1863 on Hopewell Farm in Wabash County, Indiana. And I kind of love the name, Geneva. 

KIM: Me too. I think that's beautiful. 

AMY: Yeah. She was the youngest of 12 children and grew up mainly outside communing with nature. 

KIM: Gene's family even called her "Little Bird Woman," because she once threw herself between her father's shotgun and a red-tailed hawk he had wounded. After that, she began tending to every bird on their family's land, and that included over 60 nests. In 1872, when she was just 10, one of her brothers sadly drowned in a river, and not long after, her mother died of typhoid. Then when she was 11, the family moved to the city of Wabash. It was at that point that Stratton Porter finally began attending school. She took nine birds with her that she'd rescued to school every day in cages, supposedly.

AMY: Okay, yeah, my "BS" meter is going off like crazy on that. Nine birds that you're I guess, walking with to school? No, I don't believe it.

KIM: I mean, it does seem like it could have been an exaggeration, but she did also write a book called Homing With Birds: The History of a Lifetime of Personal Experience With the Birds. So maybe there's more clarity in that. It's a bit of a memoir/nature book. But anyway, as we said, A Girl of the Limberlost is very autobiographical in a lot of ways. And before we get into the similarities between Stratton Porter's life and her art, maybe we should give a quick rundown of what this novel is all about. Sadie, would you care to fill our listeners in on the broad strokes? 

SADIE: Sure. So this is technically a sequel to the novel Freckles, however, it's a standalone read. They both take place in this piece of woodland which really existed called the Limberlost, which was a marsh which was very, very rich in bird and animal life and also very valuable timber. So Freckles is actually the story of an orphan who is sort of a guard of valuable trees in the Limberlost. And then in A Girl of the Limberlost, Elnora, the protagonist, becomes sort of the heir to all the secrets of the swamp. She kInd of communes with nature in an almost Green Mansions-like mystical way. She runs very wild, lives quite far from town on the edge of the swamp with her mother who has been maddened by grief by the loss of Elnora's father. Now her father, it should be mentioned, died in a quicksand pool in the Limberlost, sending her mother into labor, such that the mother could not throw him the branch necessary to save his life. So instead she watched his agonizing, slow death and resents and hates Elnora as a result of robbing her of her husband. So when we meet Elnora, she is starting high school. She's never really been socialized I guess, but she's very bright. She's been teaching herself. She shows up at school and is kind of a country bumpkin. She doesn't have the money or the clothes to fit in. She feels very uncomfortable. Um, some neighbors and her own wits and ingenuity help her get through it. She begins making a living by selling moths and cocoons and arrowheads -- things she finds from swamp -- to collectors, and as a result, becomes very expert and incredibly independent financially. There is much interpersonal drama with her and her mother, but basically it's a story of conservation, on the one hand, and the importance of nature, but also it's kind of a classic, old-fashioned story of grit and perseverance and overcoming the odds, which in her case are peculiar because of this very odd character of the mother. 

AMY: Yes. Which we'll get into momentarily, but the Limberlost sounds fictional. That sounds like a made-up place, like a fairy land sort of thing, but it is a real location, like you said, Sadie, kind of a bit south of Fort Wayne. And Stratton Porter lived there for some time. It was described as an area of "treacherous swamps and quagmire filled with every plant, animal and human danger known." And legend has it, the swamp got its name when a guy named "Limber Jim" went missing and then word spread that "Limber's lost." That sounds hokey, and I almost have a BS meter going off for that, too. Um, the swamp was eventually drained in 1913, but you can actually still see the Limberlost cabin. It's a rustic, Queen Anne-style log cabin where Gene Stratton Porter lived for part of her adult life. And so this area obviously inspired her writing, but getting back to her childhood ... Sadie, how would you say her early life compares with that of Elnora, her heroine in the book?

SADIE: Well, as you say, she came from an enormous family, so she obviously was not on her own. I guess they were all relatively feral, I don't know. Um, but she did grow up of course, in that area and really loved it and was a very active conservationist. She also, I think from pictures of her, looked not unlike the way the character of Elnora is described. She was very attractive with kind of auburn hair and kind of tall.

AMY: She had killer eyebrows.

SADIE: Yes, she had good, heavy eyebrows, which they mentioned, and she also did go on to sort of have a slightly more cosmopolitan life. I mean, she lived out the rest of her life, much of it in California and in the city as well, pretty happily married ... had by the standards of the time an unconventional marriage. She always was quite independent, worked a lot. He left her alone to do her own thing, moth hunting, and they got on very well. In fact, you know, I had visited both those cabins...

AMY: You have? Okay. All right. So yes, there's two, I only mentioned the first one so far, but there were two cabins that she had. Okay. So hold that thought, because we'll touch back on that in a sec.

KIM: Hang on. Can I just say, I knew that you were interested in this book because you were talking about reading it. Amy had been talking about reading it at the same time. So we decided to do this. I had no idea of, you know, your family reading it. Your reading it as a child. You visited the cabins. I mean, it's so perfect!

SADIE: I know, this is a weird coincidence with my family. I went to college in Chicago, so when we would drive to and from Chicago to New York, we'd pass through Indiana and it was on two separate trips that we visited the two different cabins, both of which are really beautiful -- more like large, rustic houses. And it was interesting for me because I had so much family in that area. People have grown up there and yeah, it's really, we'll get to that more, but it's beautiful. I recommend it. 

AMY: Okay. So I think the most important relationship in this book is the relationship between Elnora and her mother, Kate, who is to put it bluntly, emotionally abusive. And I think that's why this didn't strike me as a children's book. Kate flies into rages. She withholds affection. She's incredibly cold. It did make me wonder about Stratton Porter's relationship with her own mother before she died, as well as her relationship with her daughter, Janette, who she dedicated A Girl of the Limberlost to. Um, Sadie, let's just dive into Kate Comstock, this character. What did you make of her? 

SADIE: This character is a profoundly disturbed individual, I think it's safe to say. As you say, we see her flying into rages, being incredibly cruel to Elnora at all turns. Really seeming to hate her. We're told repeatedly that they're not, in fact, poor. They could get a lot more money out of their land, but she refuses to touch it because she won't touch anything her husband -- the sainted dead husband -- was involved with. So she won't drill for oil. She won't cut down a single tree. And as a result, they live as though they're quite poor. And Elnora is forced to go to school without fees, without books, without clothes, and indeed, her mother knows she'll need this stuff and withholds it from her, sort of to teach her a lesson and cause her to be humiliated. And there's numerous instances of this and it's quite upsetting to read. And they really go for it in some of their fights. I mean, there's one in particular I was thinking of, um, if I may read it, it's the scene where Elnora is on the brink of completing a valuable moth collection. And she's just a couple moths shy of a big collection that will actually put her through college for a collector. So the following happens: 

"Elnora, bring me the towel, quick!" cried Mrs. Comstock. 

"In a minute, mother!" mumbled Elnora. 

She was standing before the kitchen mirror tying the back part of her hair while the front turned over her face. 

"Hurry, there's a varmint of some kind." Elnora ran into the sitting room and thrust the heavy kitchen towel into her mother's hand.

Mrs. Comstock swung open the screen door and struck at some object .Elnora tossed the hair from her face so that she could see past her mother. The girl screamed wildly.

 "Don't mother!" 

Mrs. Comstock struck again. Elnora caught her arm. 

"It's the one I want. It's worth a lot of money. Don't! Oh, you shall not!"

"Shan't, Missy?" blazed Mrs. Comstock. "When did you get to bossing me?" The hand that held the screen swept a half circle and stopped at Elnora's cheek. She staggered with the blow and across her face, paled with excitement, a red mark rose rapidly. The screen slammed shut, throwing the creature on the floor before. them. Instantly Mrs. Comstock's foot crushed it. Elnora stepped back. Excepting the red mark, her face was very white. 

"That was the last moth I needed," she said, "To complete a collection worth $300. You ruined it before my eyes." 

" Moth?" cried. Mrs. Comstock. "You say that because you're mad. Moths have big wings. I know a moth."

" I've kept things from you," said Elnora, "because I didn't dare confide in you. You had no sympathy with me, but you know I've never told you untruths in all my life."

"It's no moth," reiterated. Mrs. Comstock.

"It is!" cried Elnora. "It's just out of a case in the ground, its wings take two or three hours to expand and harden."

"If I had known it was a moth..." Mrs. Comstock wavered. 

"You did know. I told you, I begged you to stop. It meant just $300 to me."

" Bah! 300 fiddlesticks," sneered Mrs. Comstock.

"They are what have paid for books, tuition, and clothes for the last four years. They are what I could've started on to college. You crushed the last one I needed before my face. You've never made any pretense of loving me. At last, I'll be equally frank with you. I hate you. You're a selfish, wicked woman. I hate you!"

AMY: Wow. That was an intense moment more than halfway through the book, I believe. And what's interesting is that's kind of one of the first moments where Elnora really snaps. Because up to that point, she kept trying to kill her mother with kindness. And then this was the moment where ... she's grown continually through the book and been gaining her strength and courage and independence, and this is when she was finally like, "No more." And the slap heard round the world, right? 

KIM: Yeah. And, you know, speaking of growing, I can't think of a single portrayal of a mother that's quite like Kate Comstock in Limberlost. I mean, there are neglectful mothers like Caddy's mother, Mrs. Jellyby, in Bleak House, but they're all kind of one-dimensional and unchanging, whereas Mrs. Comstock undergoes a real transformation and Elnora has this nobility that ends up basically winning her mother over.

SADIE: Yeah. I mean, I guess Marilla Cuthbert is very strict at the beginning. That's the closest I can think of. 

AMY: In Anne of Green Gables.

KIM: Yes, that's right. 

SADIE: And much like Anne Shirley, Elnora is a little too saintly; the way Anne gets in the later books where everyone's in love with her and she's sort of mystical. Although Elnora has more humor and is actually a pretty well-drawn character. And the mother, also, is not completely an ogre. We see moments where she's kind of funny. I imagine her as sort of an old Katharine Hepburn type; rangy, and no BS, but her hatred for Elnora and her loyalty to this husband are kind of baffling. The level of it is kind of presented as near psychotic. When she sort of comes to her senses, she suddenly devotes herself to loving her and being a great mother. And in the course of the next few chapters begins helping her hunt moths ... gets a makeover.

KIM: That was the craziest! I loved it, but I'm like, "What?"

SADIE: It's one of many make-over sequences in this book, because one odd thing, and maybe it's because she was a naturalist and an observer, she gives descriptions of clothes and food so satisfyingly: the hats and her graduation outfit ... there's a lot of that, which I always enjoy. Even when we get jumping ahead to the Chicago portions of the book, there's a very good description of a ball gown; a sort of Art Nouveau kind of gown, which you can really easily imagine looking fabulous. So that is yet another strange, but great element of this book. 

AMY: And similar to Maud Hart, Lovelace, who also excels at that sort of descriptive writing. 

SADIE: Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: And you say the mother, Kate, has had an almost instantaneous about-face. She's trying to be a new person, basically. But I think even before that moment of reform, you did see glimpses of her just not knowing how to love her daughter; like kind of wanting to, but she's so cynical and she's so damaged and hurt. I think Stratton Porter gives little moments where she wants to say something. She wants to be kind, but she just can't. 

KIM: Yeah. It's like, she's so entrenched in this way of living with her daughter, she can't find a way to get out of it. 

SADIE: It's true. And they imply that also it's hard because she's a girl. There's a little boy, a kind of B plot, Billy, who provides some comic relief as well as some poignant scenes, and she's able to be kind to him and understanding in a way she can't to Elnora. You know, Elnora is also such a paragon, such a saint, that in a way, maybe that's hard for her, too, if we choose to read it that way. 

AMY: That's true. She's borderline sugary, saccharine sweet. I think she doesn't quite get there. She has some moments of pushing back and she can be a little feisty, but yeah, it's that "Pollyanna" thing where you're just like, "Oh, God, everybody loves you," you know? 

SADIE: Exactly. And she becomes the most popular girl in school and she, of course is first in her class and incidentally, very beautiful. Oh, and can play the violin almost magically by ear, in a way she inherited from her father. Now Gene Stratton Porter was a gifted musician and could play stringed instruments, but I believe she had, you know, normal lessons. This wasn't just sort of a mystical secret of the swamp that was passed to her by osmosis. So I'd say sort of the third and fourth leads of the book are this couple, their nearest neighbors, Margaret and Wesley Sinton who have lost their own children, have a happy marriage, are much more normal than Elnora's mother. And they have, were given to understand, always looked out for Elnora. Without overstepping too much, they've given her love, they've tried to take care of her physical needs as best they could. And they've been really the one adult constant in her life. And they're prepared to help her out, financially, but she doesn't like to take money from them, being very proud and self-sufficient. But yes, they play a pivotal role and they're there throughout the story. 

KIM: What we wanted to mention, too, was that nature plays such a big role in Limberlost. It's actually much more important than Elnora's high school experience. You can see how important the natural world is to Stratton Porter. It's actually rapturous. 

AMY: Yes, rapturous almost to a ridiculous degree, at times. I'm thinking of Mrs. Comstock's almost religious/orgasmic experience in the forest. She's had this epiphany; now she wants to help her daughter collect this rare moth. Um, that scene was all a bit over the top. I can understand the level of emotion she was striving for, because the stakes are really high at that point, but it was like, "Calm it down." 

KIM: I was panting while I was reading that section. 

AMY: Yeah, there was panting in that, for sure . 

KIM: And Stratton Porter also gets really into certain key motifs that are repeated: wildflower versus hothouse flowers and moths versus butterflies. Sadie, what do you think Stratton Porter was trying to say with all that? 

SADIE: So much of what she does in the book and what she has Elnora doing by extension is trying to instill respect for the natural world. And I think having seen in her own lifetime the destruction of this gorgeous habitat around her, she really felt the necessity of making young people aware of what they have and I've not just valuing the store-bought hothouse flower or the occasional showy butterfly, but understanding the real beauty that comes when you actually take the time and attention to study it. 

AMY: Well, I want to say I did some Googling of moths after reading this book and I do have a new appreciation for how beautiful some of them actually really are. I just always think of like the brown, boring moths, but no, once you actually look into it a little more, some of these are gorgeous. And also, this summer after I had read the book, I was traveling in Eastern Ohio, a place called Hocking Hills. It's a very beautiful part of Ohio. And there was a guy there that actually will take you out on nighttime, moth-hunting expeditions, and I would have done it. The problem is you could only go on a full moon Saturday night because you needed a full moon to be able to see, I guess. It wasn't that time of the month. So I was bummed that I missed my, um, lepidoptery course, but maybe someday. 

SADIE: Actually by chance, one of my uncles, he's a hobbyist, but he collects Lepidoptera, which is night moths, in California. And I've gone out with him a couple of times in my childhood. And we did the process she describes as doping, of putting a mixture of beer and brown sugar on trees, painting it to attract them. And then you collect the specimens. It's really interesting.

KIM: I love that you've done that! That's great. And we should put some pictures of these moths too, on our Instagram for this episode. I think it'd be cool to show people. Um, so let's talk about Elnora's love interest that sort of comes up later in the book. 

SADIE: I mean, what do you think? 

KIM: I thought he was a bit flat, personally, compared to Joe Willard in the Betsy-Tacy books. 

AMY: I mean, I just thought this whole romance was not even necessary. Really, to me, the love story was between her and her mother. This felt really tacked on. 

KIM: Like, “Oh, it needs a love story because it's a coming-of-age.” But the love story, like we were talking about high school, it's actually even more incidental. Yeah. It's kind of tacked on. 

SADIE: It's true. And there's something odd about it too. I mean, it's basically... Here's what happens. So Philip Ammon is, um, I guess he's educated in the East. They say he went to Harvard; his family's in Chicago. They have some social standing. He's a young lawyer, but also very interested in moths, as one is. And he is convalescing and comes to stay with his uncle in the town of Onabasha, which abuts the Limberlost. And in his ramblings runs across Elnora, very picturesquely, gathering moths. He becomes sort of her helper for the summer. He's engaged to a girl back home, a Chicago belle named Edith Carr. Elnora knows about this; her mother doesn't. Elnora falls in love with him in the course of this. They have so many interests in common and he's apparently extremely handsome and, like her, kind of too good to be true. They're both basically perfect. But then he leaves, he returns to Chicago and to Edith Carr, who we are given to understand is superficial, generally crummy, inferior to Elnora in almost every conceivable way, although strikingly beautiful. 

AMY: She would be the "butterfly," as opposed to Elnora's "moth," so to speak.

SADIE: Yeah. So long story short, Phillip Ammon and Edith Carr have a ball. The theme is moths, although she's not interested in them. She wears this fabulous-sounding Poiret kind of gown, which is very easy to picture in exactly the palette of this one, Yellow Emperor moth, which just so happens to be the one moth Elnora needs to finish her collection. They are having the ball. It's glorious. They're about to announce their engagement formally when what should flit across the ballroom, but a Yellow Emperor moth! 

KIM: Too good to be true; but it happens. 

SADIE: Yeah. Philip Ammon scoops it up, very excited. Runs to send it to Elnora -- knows it's the last one she needs to complete her collection. Edith Carr is mortified, goes into a jealous rage, publicly humiliates him, throws his ring to the ground. That night, I think Philip realizes Elnora is better; shows up at the Limberlost and begins courting her. As you say, there's not a lot of heat there. I think it's safe to say sexual things in this book are very strange because they're not absent. There's that very odd early sequence in which there's a gang of thieves in the Limberlost, one of whom is basically afraid he will not be able to resist the temptation of raping Elnora. And he writes her a note to this effect saying, "Don't, for the love of God, go into the Limberlost by yourself. There are bad men who are doing things you can't imagine. 

AMY: He's a peeping Tom; he spies on her in her bedroom.

KIM: Yeah, and that continues to be alluded to throughout the novel.

AMY: I was very confused by this. 

KIM: Yeah. You're waiting for something to happen.

AMY: And she sets the stage for something awful is going to happen with this lascivious lurking guy. And then nothing happened with it.

SADIE: I mean, I guess we see key things from that part. First of all, the mother learns about it. So it's the first time we see her kind of behaving appropriately. She's like, "Okay, we're not letting that happen. I know what that means," and kind of handles it like a normal adult. And then Elnora defies the explicit orders of this note and does go in by herself, runs into exactly this guy, and he then is, I guess, so kind of humbled by her purity and goodness or her innocence or something that he helps her catch moths all night. But a very, very odd contrast to then her high school life, which is presented as clean and fresh and conventional and wholesome. So it's almost going between the Betsy-Tacy world and this dark, Gothic world with affairs and sexuality.

AMY: And, um, that's why it's making me laugh that you read this as a kid.

KIM: I know yeah. So there's this ongoing tension throughout the book; a sexual tension. 

SADIE: And she's pretty naive and innocent too. It doesn't occur to her that this could be an issue. Then the swamp is an odd kind of character. isn't it? Because on the one hand it's a source of her wealth and it's a source of incredible wonder, but it's also really sinister. And the pool where her dad went down is right on the edge of their property. They pass it every day, and he's presumably at the bottom. So that's Gothic. And then you've got this other world of Chicago brought in; kind of normal, Chicago high society. It's all peculiar. I'm not quite sure why she brought in the romance, except that she kind of gets into it. Like there's way more purple prose surrounding that. As over the top as that is, and as unconvincing as I find their relationship, there are moments where he talks about what he wants out of life and out of a partner, which I think are quite moving. And, um, one of the mom's better scenes, I think, is when he returns to the Limberlost. Now he wants to marry Elnora and the mom is like, "What the hell do you think you're doing? A day ago you were engaged to someone else. Don't do this to her. She's not your plaything." Now I have to say, I find the final act very unsatisfying of this book and they wrap it up too fast. I don't like how everyone just suddenly shows up in, you know, the same place. Like, I don't know if you've read much Georgette Heyer, but there's an irritating convention in those books where all the characters kind of converge in one place. Hijinks ensue, and it's sort of like that. 

AMY: Yeah, and you're not even in the swamp anymore. 

SADIE: It's really odd. 

AMY: Okay, so we're critiquing this, but I think we can all say we loved it, right? 

KIM: Oh, absolutely, 100%. 

AMY: So how do we square that? Because there are things that are wrong with this book .

SADIE: Yeah.

AMY: Wherein lies the joy?

SADIE: For me, I mean, it's so many things. I find this such a vivid book. You go in with the understanding that it's overwrought, it's kind of purple. It's very old-fashioned in certain ways. And within that, you can find moments of such beauty, and I think such truthful writing and such great description. And I don't know about you, but I come away with an appreciation for so many of the things she talks about. You learn a lot about moths in a very non-didactic way. You really do absorb these lessons while caught up in the plot. And I think there's the usual pleasures of a coming-of-age story; of someone overcoming, as you say. The relationship with her mother, that's sort of a satisfying evolution, even if the romance is less so. But you kind of leave with a picture of a world as beautifully described as someone who indeed did describe things for a living and with that kind of appreciation. And if you like it, Freckles is worth reading too. If possible, it's even stranger and even heavier on the nature. But one thing that's nice is that she doesn't distinguish between girls and boys and what they can do. And Elnora is just as independent as Freckles was. In some ways, unwisely.so, because worse things can happen to young girls, as we're told. But she's just as competent, just as capable, just as smart. No one thinks she isn't. And I think for a young girl that's fun read, 

KIM: I agree. And I love the Elnora character. I mean, melodramatic or no, I absolutely love her. I love how she feels about nature and how she is her true self. Even with her friends, you know, even though you might consider the popular group, whatever, superficial or something, they appreciate who she is. And I love that. I mean, there's so much to love about this book. 

AMY: Mm-hm. And then just briefly getting back to Gene Stratton Porter. You mentioned that you had been to the Limberlost cabin and what's the other cabin, the Cabin at Wildflower Woods, which is now in Gene Stratton, Porter State Historic Park. 

SADIE: It's really beautiful. Um, and you know, they brought back a lot of the Limberlost. It's now called Loblolly Marsh, which is its indigenous name. And the biodiversity isn't what it was, but it's bounced back amazingly and it's really gorgeous. So if you're passing through that part of Indiana, definitely make the detour. I mean, as for the house it's gorgeous, it's kind of, um, Arts and Crafts era. It's rustic, but beautiful and comfortable. And you can tell that she did have a very artistic eye and she did a lot of the watercolors there. And I think, like Elnora, could probably just whip together a little birch-bark basket in 20 seconds and fill it with violets. 

AMY: And if you visit there now, you can take a twilight nature hike there with a naturalist, which I totally want to do.

SADIE: I want to also. I don't think you could even do that back when I went. And I think probably the marsh is way more established than it was when I was there too. Because I was in college, so that's a while now and I want to go back 

KIM: Definitely. 

AMY: And speaking of the swamp, this book reminded me a lot of Where the Crawdads Sing, that Delia Owens novel. I mean, just the idea of this mostly independent young woman with an abusive parent who has to fend for herself, basically. If you liked that book, which I know a lot of people did, it came out two or three years ago. Um, this is totally in the same vein. 

SADIE: That's true. Yeah. I wouldn't have thought of that, but you're absolutely right. 

KIM: I liked this one so much better than that one, but you know, that's just me. I know a lot of people love the Crawdads one. But Limberlost did remind me, in a good way, of Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson. We discussed that book with Anne Boyd Rioux in Episode 11. So. Amy, did that remind you of it?

AMY: Yeah, the natural elements. And then also the Mackinac Island reference too, um, 

SADIE: I want to watch these adaptations. I've seen one of them as a kid and I was sort of disappointed, but I'd be curious now to go and check them out. And there's also a mini series, no?

AMY: Well, there's a 1990 version. That one leaves out the love story. So they really focus on the mother-daughter relationship. And there's a lot more about "Is the mom going to sell off part of the land, um, for oil drilling or what have you?" I didn't love it. Then there's a 1930 version. I wouldn't even recommend that one at all. Totally goofy. And then there's a 1934 one, which I've just skimmed. They're all kind of available on YouTube. I know the 1934 and the 1990 one you can watch in its entirety on YouTube. I thought the 1934 version was the most authentic. It hewed the most closely to the story. And the best actor in that was a little boy that played Billy. Everybody else was okay, but he had heart-wrenching moments and he brought it. 

KIM: You know what that makes me think, did we mention about Gene Stratton Porter starting her own silent film production company in 1924?

SADIE: That's true. She had that whole, whole other career in Hollywood. 

KIM: Yeah. What do you know about that? 

SADIE: Not much, just that she did it and lived out the rest of her years in Hollywood and actually made pretty good money doing it. That she was an impressive business woman. 

KIM: Yeah, didn't she live part-time on Catalina island, too?

SADIE: Yeah, there's a house on Catalina island, which I'm sure is also amazing. 

AMY: Yeah. And speaking of films, you can see actual film footage of Gene Stratton Porter building that house. So if you want to see what she looks like, we can provide the clip to that. You know, usually with these lost ladies, we only get to see photographs, but you can actually see some film footage of her, which is great.

KIM: And switching gears a little bit, but still talking about a lost lady, Sadie, I was so excited. I saw that you wrote the preface for the new Persephone edition of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Deepening Spring, and we discussed Canfield Fisher's, The Home-maker back in Episode 9,, one of our first episodes of this podcast. Persephone is one of our favorite publishers, of course, and I love that they tapped you to write the preface for The Deepening Spring. Is it something you get asked to do often? How did that happen? 

SADIE: I've done a few prefaces, I guess, but I know the Persephone people, who are wonderful. And I think I had mentioned to them just in conversation that I very much liked Dorothy Canfield Fisher. I read her as a kid. Understood Betsy was one of my favorite children's books. Like The Home-maker, it really is a way for her to talk about kind of Montessori education, which she brought to America. And so she's always interested me as a writer and a figure. I hadn't read The Deepening Stream until they gave it to me, but it's a very interesting World War I novel, actually. And she writes children uncannily well. So the first third is really about that. I recommend it, and I was so lucky to get to do that. It was pure fun. 

KIM: I can't wait to read it. 

SADIE: I'll drop one in the mail for you if you give me the best address.

KIM: Can't wait. Okay, great, I will!

AMY: Anyway, so thank you for making a return appearance on the podcast. You're our first returning guest and we, again, loved having you. You're so much fun. 

SADIE: I'm honored! And I always have so much fun. Listen, I'd come back any time and talk with strange intensity about YA books of the first half of the 20th century. 

KIM: Oh, you're the best. That was fantastic. Thank you. Sadie! 

SADIE: Thank you so much.

AMY: So we'll sign off now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes. You can get a jump on your reading if you're inclined to read along with us. 

KIM: And as always check out our website lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show and further information.

AMY: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.