Review of A Mountain Woman by Elia W. Peattie
Rev. of A Mountain Woman by Elia W. Peattie
The Dial 22
(1 Jan. 1897): 23-24
Page 23
There is no lack of variety in a sheaf of eight stories
collectively entitled "A Mountain Woman," the work of Mrs. Elia
W. Peattie. We are successively introduced to a series of typical
figures, and each of them is portrayed with an amount of
sympathetic insight that may fairly be called remark-
Page 24
able. Among the figures in this gallery that make the deepest impression are those of the superb creature who dominates the titular story, of Jim Lancy and his wife, who met their Waterloo on a mortgaged Nebraska farm, and gave up the unequal struggle for subsistence after heroic efforts to get the better of fate, of a released convict who finds the woman of his love waiting for him after twenty dreary years of imprisonment, of the devoted servant of God, Father de Smet, of a miner who has "made his pile" in fifteen years "up the gulch," and has kept his soul alive during the process, and of "a lady of yesterday" whose story, or what little of it is told us, remains a tender and fragrant recollection. These stories are carefully finished work, and possess the quality of poetic pathos in quite unusual degree. In the distinction of their manner, as well as in their choice of scene, they suggest the work of Mrs. Mary Hallock Foote, and do not suffer in the comparison.
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