Rev. of The Beleaguered Forest
by Elia W. Peattie
Pratt, Cornelia Atwood
Rev. of The Beleaguered Forest by Elia W. Peattie
Critic 24
(Sept. 1901): 263
Page 263
Every woman who lives and writes, has written, or will write, a novel about a young girl and her evolution in contact with experience. There are times when the inevitable excursions of Youth into the Land of Reality seem the only things worth considering in the spiritual universe -- for Youth is high-hearted and Reality is inexorable, and the hunger to see the former conquer is as old as the human heart. But the woman who does not publish her novel when she writes it is often well-advised, for there is no task in fiction quite so difficult as to make the average reader take the young girl's evolution with due seriousness.
In "The Beleaguered Forest"* Mrs. Peattie has written a novel of the young girl, but has very cleverly put it beyond the reach of the scoffer by the idyllic setting she has given the story. Regina Gray -- lonely, sensitive, a dreamer, a would-be artist who has just learned that her art is futile and her little fortune dissipated -- is suddenly offered marriage by a man almost a stranger, one who has as few ties to society as herself. He is a lumberman, morose, conscious of isolation, striving to get into touch with his kind, afflicted (though she does not know) with a drug-habit.
She goes away with him to the lumber-camp, into the heart of the forest, and there her brief married life is spent against the background of the pines. The book is a story of the inner life, the girl's record of her own growth and her husband's deterioration. It is a strange, uncanny tale. Life under pine-boughs has always and everywhere a subtle quality of its own -- dream-like, intoxicating, indescribable, but known to all on whom the spell has fallen. This quality Mrs. Peattie reproduces skilfully in the atmosphere of her story, which ends, fittingly, with Regina's exit from the woods. As a whole, the book is a picturesque experiment with a very individual flavor, rather than a test of the author's matured powers.
CORNELIA ATWOOD PRATT.
* "The Beleaguered Forest." By Elia W. Peattie. D. Appleton & Co. $1.50.
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