Review of A Mountain Woman by Elia W. Peattie
Rev. of A Mountain Woman by Elia W. Peattie
Bookman 3
July 1896): 460
Page 460
A MOUNTAIN WOMAN. By Elia W. Peattie. Chicago: Way & Williams. $1.25.
If any one were to name the best quality of the Western school of fiction, it would be a very fine sincerity untouched by cynicism. Faithfulness to reality, and yet a belief in the real human nature that it finds. This is the best democracy.
Mrs. Peattie has done some work very characteristic of her school, and yet individual. One is impressed at the very outset with the honesty and vitality of her observations. They give such stories as "Jim Lancy's Waterloo" and "A Michigan Man" their hold on the imagination and the memory. The tragedy of the life that spends all its force in the brute struggle with the soil is as forcibly put in the first of these as in anything by Hamlin Garland. Mrs. Peattie is perhaps a more indigenous Westerner than Mrs. Graham. At least one might set a certain masculine robustness of tone in her work over against the peculiarly refined touch of Stories of the Foot-hills. But the tales which make this volume have not only straightforwardness and vigour to commend them, they include stories which only a woman could write. "Up the Gulch" is one of these. It is hard to say which is the more winning personality in this sketch: Little Roeder, who has made his big "pile" up the Gulch, and who has come down to try to enjoy it at the mountain pleasure resort, a wistful figure in his loneliness and his self-conscious elegance of attire, or the sympathetic young Eastern mother, who befriends and so unintentionally misleads him.
"'Don't you go! Sit still! I'm not blamin' you fur anythin'; but I may never, 's long 's I live, find any one who will understand things the way you understand 'em. Here! I tell you about that gulch an' you see that gulch. You know how th' rain sounded thar, an' how th' shack looked, an' th' life I led, an' all th' thoughts I had, an' th' long nights, an' th' times when -- but never mind. I know you know it all. I saw it in yer eyes.'"
There is the something in this sketch which seizes the heart. And the real quality of the volume, of which this is part evidence, makes us look with hope to Mrs. Peattie's literary future.
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