Gene Stratton-Porter, Freckles
No, wait, wait, don't go! I know that with a title like Freckles, by Gene Stratton-Porter, it's going to sound like some sort of teen novel, probably featuring someone plucky, and with some kind of romance plot, and I don't....
Actually, yeah. Published in 1904, Freckles IS a teen novel featuring a plucky young man of ignoble birth who falls in love with an even pluckier younger woman of high birth. But - and this is key, so pay attention - there's a twist. Instead of vampires, there are loggers: the hero guards the Limberlost Swamp against timber thieves so the trees can be cut down by the man who holds the actual timber lease, but falls madly in love with the flowers and birds and whatnot. The girl visits the swamp just to spend time with its extravagant flora and fauna, along with a slightly older woman who's an accomplished nature photographer, so there's romantic tension along with conservationist tension.
And also: gunplay! orphans! love! accidents, some comical and some nearly fatal! paternity revealed! male homosocial bonding, with hugging and declarations of love between employer and employee! Scots dialect! vultures, both human and avian!
Gene Stratton-Porter was a wildly popular Indiana novelist writing at the very beginning of the 20th century, with many of her novels being set in and around the Limberlost Swamp (notably A Girl of the Limberlost); she also wrote a number of nature books, formed a movie company, and financially supported wetlands conservation with the income from her assorted endeavours. Freckles was apparently made into a movie in both 1935 and 1960, so I'll have to see if I can find one or the other of those, but I was really intrigued by the way that her characters are represented as loving the "unspoiled" nature but also respecting the timber industry, to such an extent that the nature-lovers are excited by the prospect of having furniture veneered by bird's-eye maple taken from the Limberlost.
It's a long way from the union-loving complexity of Roderick Haig-Brown's Timber, even though there's a romance plot in that novel as well, and a long way from the cursing and homocentricity of the nearly contemporaneous Woodsmen of the West, by M. Allerdale Grainger, but I'm grateful to Nancy Holmes for pointing me toward it. I've been thinking about those other two novels in terms of their potential utility for thinking about the collaborative activity needed to respond to climate change's local impacts on forests both large and small in British Columbia, and Freckles offers something quite different. I don't know what to do with it, but there's something to be done: maybe somebody can suggest some ideas....
Actually, yeah. Published in 1904, Freckles IS a teen novel featuring a plucky young man of ignoble birth who falls in love with an even pluckier younger woman of high birth. But - and this is key, so pay attention - there's a twist. Instead of vampires, there are loggers: the hero guards the Limberlost Swamp against timber thieves so the trees can be cut down by the man who holds the actual timber lease, but falls madly in love with the flowers and birds and whatnot. The girl visits the swamp just to spend time with its extravagant flora and fauna, along with a slightly older woman who's an accomplished nature photographer, so there's romantic tension along with conservationist tension.
And also: gunplay! orphans! love! accidents, some comical and some nearly fatal! paternity revealed! male homosocial bonding, with hugging and declarations of love between employer and employee! Scots dialect! vultures, both human and avian!
Gene Stratton-Porter was a wildly popular Indiana novelist writing at the very beginning of the 20th century, with many of her novels being set in and around the Limberlost Swamp (notably A Girl of the Limberlost); she also wrote a number of nature books, formed a movie company, and financially supported wetlands conservation with the income from her assorted endeavours. Freckles was apparently made into a movie in both 1935 and 1960, so I'll have to see if I can find one or the other of those, but I was really intrigued by the way that her characters are represented as loving the "unspoiled" nature but also respecting the timber industry, to such an extent that the nature-lovers are excited by the prospect of having furniture veneered by bird's-eye maple taken from the Limberlost.
It's a long way from the union-loving complexity of Roderick Haig-Brown's Timber, even though there's a romance plot in that novel as well, and a long way from the cursing and homocentricity of the nearly contemporaneous Woodsmen of the West, by M. Allerdale Grainger, but I'm grateful to Nancy Holmes for pointing me toward it. I've been thinking about those other two novels in terms of their potential utility for thinking about the collaborative activity needed to respond to climate change's local impacts on forests both large and small in British Columbia, and Freckles offers something quite different. I don't know what to do with it, but there's something to be done: maybe somebody can suggest some ideas....
Comments
~Jasmine