Freckles by Gene Stratton-Porter ~ 1904. This edition: Doubleday Junior Deluxe Classics, 1967. Hardcover. Illustrated by Ruth Ives. 320 pages.
My rating: It’s complicated.
10/10 for childhood nostalgia and deeply sentimental romance of the boy-girl love affair; about a 2/10 for its cringe-worthy aspects in regards to class distinctions and the strong dependence by the author on the idea that “good birth” and “aristocratic heritage” trumps environment, upbringing, natural intelligence and aspects of genuine personal integrity; another 10/10 for its lovely descriptions of the flora and fauna of the swamp, and for the sharp-shooting, utterly fearless female characters the “Bird Woman” and the “Swamp Angel”; these women aren’t afraid to go about alone, get dirty, pursue their personal interests with complete competence, are respected and admired by everyone they meet – including the scruffiest of the “bad guys” – and at the end of the day go home to a hot bath and a complete change of attire to become “dainty beauties”. Oh, golly, I want to be them! With an ugly-handsome, physically-perfect-yet-interestingly-maimed, sterling-natured, completely devoted lover (such as our titular Freckles) on a silken leading string. Sigh…
Where was I? Oh, yes. Rating. Decisions, decisions…
I’d better give it something fairly high, because I do still love this book, despite the squeamishness it stirs within me when I think about it too hard. Here we are, then: 7.5/10.
Time travelling, in several aspects, this reading experience was.
On a personal level, I first read this book back when I was just 11 or 12, and periodically in the years since, and a good percentage of my affection for it is pure nostalgia. That and the fact that the hero and heroine are so darned adorable, and their love story, coming to a climax with the hero being gravely wounded rescuing the heroine from an unpleasantly dramatic death, is of the sort to cause serious heart throbbing in a susceptible young reader.
On a historical level, this is very decidedly a book which deserves the label “period piece.” It is very much a product of its era, and many of the attitudes and assumptions Gene Stratton-Porter captures and espouses so strongly are quite distasteful to this modern day reader, and though I still feel the appeal of the fairy tale nature of the story and the complete and utter good-ness of its main characters, I can only hold on to that affection by viewing it forgivingly through my rose-tinted “era appropriate” lenses. (Handy categorization, that!)
Oh, golly. Look at the time! Must condense and get on with this. Luckily the World Wide Web is bursting with reviews on this one, if any of you are keen to investigate further. Here’s the barest outline.
Way back at the turn of the 19th Century, Indiana’s 13,000 acre Limberlost Swamp (a real place) was a deeply mysterious, untouched-by-man enclave of flora and fauna. Including some exceedingly valuable trees, both from the everyday “lumbering” aspect and for the incredible value of occasional ancient, huge, furniture-making stand-alone hardwood trees, such as birds-eye maple, black walnut, and golden oak. A timber lease was a valuable business enterprise, and forest guards were routinely employed to patrol the borders of the leases to avoid trespassing and theft of the most valuable of the trees. (A genuine occurrence, which is still common today.)
Our hero, the teenage “Freckles,” brought up in an orphanage from babyhood, is employed as a timber guard by a wealthy timber boss, who looks past Freckles’ shabby clothes and missing hand (cut off in unknown circumstances just before his appearance on the orphanage steps) to his sterling heart within and falls in paternalistic love with the boy at first sight. Freckles makes a success of his timber patrols, pluckily routing the Big Bad Timber Thieves with his cudgel and revolver, and pausing occasionally in his tireless rounds to commune with the flowers and make friends with the little forest animals.
Here they are at their first meeting, the manly youth Freckles and the pure and lovely Swamp Angel.
Freckles falls in love with a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl who regularly accompanies an older woman friend into the swamp, the photographer and naturalist known only as the “Bird Woman.” Many adventures ensue, with encounters with various wild creatures and vanquishing timber thieves, etcetera. The “Swamp Angel,” as Freckles names the lovely girl (we never do find out her real name), returns his love, though he doesn’t realize it until he saves her from being squashed by a falling tree and sustains horrible injuries himself. Swamp Angel rallies her wealthy father to transport Freckles to the best hospital in Chicago, where he is patched together physically, though he threatens to expire because he is so depressed that he will never be able to speak his love to Angel because he is merely a nameless Irish orphan who could not seek to raise his eyes to a child of wealth and good breeding.
Angel trots off to discover Freckles’ heritage, miraculously does so, and Freckles rallies and the birds all sing in celebration (okay, I added that last bit in, but you get the idea), and manly and womanly tears are shed in great abundance (that bit is in the book – they do all cry a lot, men and women both. And people faint fairly frequently, come to think of it…) and everything ends gloriously happily.
That’s pretty well it. Drama, tears, adventures, love at first sight, bad guys, cute forest creatures, pretty flowers, more drama, more tears, happy ending.
Please excuse my flippant tone this morning. This thing really is a sentimental, highly clichéd, occasionally cringe-making bit of romance literature, and though I love it I also feel a bit ashamed of the bad bits, such as the snobbishness of the author regarding class distinctions, and the complete acceptance of it being perfectly all right to raze and drain a unique natural forest while blithering on about how lovely it all is and oh, well, too bad it’s doomed but we do need some nice veneers for our bedroom furniture, and some more acres to grow corn and pasture our mules, and at least we have some specimens of pressed flowers, dead moths, animal skins and photographs to remember it by.
But there is some lovely writing, and it is a rather sweet love story, and the Ruth Ives illustrations in my childhood edition are rather adorable. The author’s love of nature does shine through, though she seems to have no qualms about contemplating the destruction of the Limberlost to the greater profit of the timber companies. Because to be good and rich is an admirable thing, as her wide-eyed, obviously approving descriptions of the wealth of Angel’s family makes very clear.
Yes, I guess I am a bit conflicted.
This book was followed by another much better known, A Girl of the Limberlost, in 1909, which I am halfway through at this point. It’s an interesting read, and I’m just as conflicted by it as I am by Freckles.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Gene Stratton-Porter and her fictional characters very soon.
A page scan from “Freckles”, highlighting the best bits of the book, the descriptions of Freckles learning about and interacting with the wild things of the Limberlost Swamp. Ruth Ives illustrations throughout are a definite bonus to the Doubleday edition.
Leaves & Pages 
I read A Girl of the Limberlost at summer camp way back when. (Good camping book, what with all the nature.)
I never got around to reading Freckles though. Sounds like I should hunt down an illustrated copy if I ever do.
The Ruth Ives illustrations are lovely, I must say. And if you enjoyed Limberlost, you’d likely really enjoy Freckles. Fairly easy to find, I would think, as it was in print not too many years ago and there are many editions out there. I noticed Gene S-P is often found in the juvenile/young adult section, so that would be the first place I’d look in the library or bookstore. 🙂
I read Girl of the Limberlost a year or two ago for the first time (without having read this), and I had similarly mixed feelings about it. I’ll be interested to see what you think when you finish it. (I found the last half less troubling than the first, FWIW.)
I’m about 3/4 through, and finding some bits rather annoying – so DRAMATIC! But other bits are quite lovely. A post is already formulating itself… 😉
Like you I read this while still quite young and very uncritical and now love parts of it and feel horror at other bits. I actually read Girl of the Limberlost first and then Freckles and then everything I could find that she had read. Her last books after she moved to California are very racist toward Asians, the entire “Yellow Peril” ideas of the day are in them and I could never like them at all. Yet there is a lot to love about some parts of some of her work. Laddie may be my favorite of her books.
She’s not a writer I feel in total agreement with, that’s for sure. Quite a mix of sentiments expressed in these books, aren’t there? Quite fascinating glimpses of a century ago in any event. 🙂
I meant “she had written”, not she had read!
Oh boy. I cannot wait for you to read Her Father’s Daughter! Some of the most lyrical, historically memorable writing about the still wild, early 20th century California mountains – and with what cringe-inducing attitudes about the Japanese! A great book and a horrible book, much like these, but more mature. Fascinating.
I’m a little afraid to look for this one! 😉 Though I am certain I will take the bait. What a horribly fascinating writer G S-P is…
I grew up with A Girl of the Limberlost, and I loved it uncritically. But I only tried her other books in the last few years, and Freckles was a complete shock. I had always wanted to know more about him & the Angel, after the part they played in AGOTL, but I could hardly get through it. And sadly I’ve had the same reaction to the other books of hers that I’ve tried. But none of them had Ruth Ives illustrations!
Just finished AGOTL, and I am completely at a loss with how to go about communicating my response to it. I can see how it is so beloved of so many, particularly if they first read it in youth, but there are some glaringly melodramtic scenarios that set my teeth on edge. Edith Carr’s whole rather ridiculously over-emotional saga, and, earlier than that, the body of the father being horribly entombed in the swamp just outside the family cottage. No wonder the mother’s hair went white, and that she wanders keening in the night…
But much of it is really good, a grand story in the classic story-telling tradition, with a heroine we are expected to root for (and we do) and her fairytale life of overcoming a number of nasty bumps before things start to go right for her as a reward for her steadfastness and sterling nature. 😉
I read Girl of the Limberlost a few years ago, ie as an adult – what a strange book. I think there are some connections with this one? Anyway, look forward to your review of it. I don’t suppose I’ll be rushing to read this one by the sound of things…
“Strange” is the word for the Girl of the Limberlost – both the book and the unlikely character! 😉 I need to pop over to your blog and see if you were inspired to write about one of the weirdest episodes, that of Edith Carr’s attending her engagement party in pale yellow velvet with draperies mimicking moth wings and purple gloves and stockings – she has been dressed up by her fiance (who is secretly in love with moth-hunting Elnora, the heroine) to represent – guess what? – a moth!
The Freudian implications of many of the plot twists in Limberlost are rather mind-boggling.
Freckles just gets by on nostalgia for me, I suspect. If I had read it first as an adult I think it would be *much* less appealing. Though there are lovely bits of description here and there, the characters are impossibly perfect and the thing is dripping with sentiment. Very cringe-inducing.
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I am still young and have read both freckles and a girl of the limberlost multiple times, the first time I read them I did not quite understand the dilemma the older readers are experiencing with the perfection of the characters( The Swamp Angel, Freckles, and Elnora were the examples and heroes I truly needed to have at the time). I didn’t ever understand some of the factors (ex. Freckles being fine with the destruction his beloved limberlost) until I realized what period the stories were in and beliefs that must have been inbred into Gene Stratton-Porter. I find the perfection and goodness of the characters to be a bit refreshing when I am being pounded with other protagonists which I can’t completely love for faults and mistakes. All in all I enjoyed these books, if you are being held back… remember that the beliefs were different(even if the beliefs are very wrong they were accepted)
Thank you for the comment. 🙂 I think that a lot of our conflicting views on these characters/books have to do with how much we change as readers through our lives – what we need and what we get from the exact same book evolves with our own development and experience. My daughter and I were just discussing this sort of thing in depth – how sometimes going back to something one has loved in younger years is suddenly see to be something very much less (or even just different) than it was when we read it. I think that the perfection of Gene Stratton-Porter’s protagonists is tremendously appealing when one is in the process of maturing and is looking for role models in one’s reading, also when older and continually being confronted by the flaws of real life people – “escape” reading is a real and valuable thing to have available during the whole range of our lives, I believe – we can take refuge and encouragement from it, and be better prepared to cope with our challenges in the real world because of our rest from it. Does that make sense? And of course sometimes it’s just plain enjoyable to poke a bit of fun at too-good-to-be-true characters and melodramatic situations. We roll our eyes but we keep reading! 😉 (And writing about what we’re reading – in all its flawed glory!)
I love a Girl of the Limberlost AND Freckles, and I read both when I was younger (I amnow 67). I continue to read them through the years, because like Louisa May Alcott, they show sterling characters versus non, giving young people something to strive for, hopefully, other than “Don’t Care”). It is always helpful to remember that these were published when these thoughts and morals were the times of the day. I too was shocked by the bitterness expressed in “Her Father’s Daughter”, but it is a useful touchstone for actual feelings of the day. Much like today, nobody wants Confederate anything around, though it is still a part of our history. If we don’t learn from history, we may repeat its mistakes….always a good thing to remember!
I enjoyed reading these comments very much.