From Smithsonian Magazine:
My dear Girl:
In the first place will you allow me to suggest that you forget
hereafter to tack the “ess” on to “author”, because one who writes
a book or poem is an author and literature has no sex.
–Gene Stratton-Porter, letter to Miss Mabel Anderson, March 9, 1923
. . . .
Yellow sprays of prairie dock bob overhead in the September morning light. More than ten feet tall, with a central taproot reaching even deeper underground, this plant, with its elephant-ear leaves the texture of sandpaper, makes me feel tipsy and small, like Alice in Wonderland.
I am walking on a trail in a part of northeast Indiana that in the 19th century was impenetrable swamp and forest, a wilderness of some 13,000 acres called the Limberlost. Nobody knows the true origin of the name. Some say an agile man known as “Limber” Jim Corbus once got lost there. He either returned alive or died in the quicksand and quagmires, depending which version you hear.
Today, a piece of the old Limberlost survives in the Loblolly Marsh Nature Preserve, 465 acres of restored swampland in the midst of Indiana’s endless industrial corn and soybean fields. It’s not obvious to the naked eye, but life here is imitating art imitating life. The artist was Gene Stratton-Porter, an intrepid naturalist, novelist, photographer and movie producer who described and dramatized the Limberlost over and over, and so, even a century after her death, served as a catalyst for saving this portion of it.
As famous in the early 1900s as J.K. Rowling is now, Stratton-Porter published 26 books: novels, nature studies, poetry collections and children’s books. Only 55 books published between 1895 and 1945 sold upwards of one million copies. Gene Stratton-Porter wrote five of those books—far more than any other author of her time. Nine of her novels were made into films, five by Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, one of the first movie and production companies owned by a woman. “She did things wives of wealthy bankers just did not do,” says Katherine Gould, curator of cultural history at the Indiana State Museum.
Her natural settings, wholesome themes and strong lead characters fulfilled the public’s desires to connect with nature and give children positive role models. She wrote at a pivotal point in American history. The frontier was fading. Small agrarian communities were turning into industrial centers connected by railroads. By the time she moved to the area, in 1888, this unique watery wilderness was disappearing because of the Swamp Act of 1850, which had granted “worthless” government-owned wetlands to those who drained them. Settlers took the land for timber, farming and the rich deposits of oil and natural gas. Stratton-Porter spent her life capturing the landscape before, in her words, it was “shorn, branded and tamed.” Her impact on conservation was later compared to President Theodore Roosevelt’s.
. . . .
One of the movement’s leaders, Ken Brunswick, remembered reading Stratton-Porter’s What I Have Done With Birds when he was young—a vibrant 1907 nature study that reads like an adventure novel. At a time when most bird studies and illustrations were based on dead, stuffed specimens, Stratton-Porter mucked through the Limberlost in her swamp outfit in search of birds and nests to photograph:
A picture of a Dove that does not make that bird appear tender and loving, is a false reproduction. If a study of a Jay does not prove the fact that it is quarrelsome and obtrusive it is useless, no matter how fine the pose or portrayal of markings….A Dusky Falcon is beautiful and most intelligent, but who is going to believe it if you illustrate the statement with a sullen, sleepy bird?
Link to the rest at Smithsonian Magazine
My husband’s father, a coal-miner from Pennsylvania, was fond all his life of the Gene Stratton Porter books he read as a young man. You can find accounts of WWI veterans buying them by the carload.
Myself, I liked all of her fiction. Like many of the popular authors of her approximate time (c.f., Albert Payson Terhune) she illustrated for me when I read her as a child in the 50s-60 just how different in some ways the past was, even in modest rural America. The stories were all about leading a clean, upstanding, moral life as a citizen, and sentimental in a relatively “muscular” way, with clear demonstrations of both masculine and feminine methods of strength and honor under trial.
It was interesting watching her characters living through social issues of the day such as the electrification of farms, clean living, self-reliant young orphans, back to nature for recipes, the treatment of urban slums, raising oneself from the lower classes, surviving bad marriages. All of this was terra incognita when I read them as a child — the first discussions of them in any form.
Porter’s books also included lurid elements of the more unpleasant fascinations of her day: alarms about the yellow peril (even in stories that celebrated the great melting-pot that was America), and the inborn greater moral worth of a white woman to an Indian woman were two that struck me even as a child. But of course, I read as a child of my own time, and enjoyed the books despite my head-shaking when things like that came by. They made it easier to recognize similar issues in the current shibboleths of my own time.
Like many books written for adults, they’ve passed to later generations as books for children, in spite of adult topics such as child cruelty and marital abuse.
Recommended gateway drug: Freckles (avoid all the movies). Then: The Beekeeper, The Harvester, Her Father’s Daughter.
Um, “Keeper of the Bees”, not “Beekeeper”. (I’ve been making that mistake for decades…)