A Girl of the Limberlost: The Thing I Missed Back Then

Awhile back in a discussion of books that we loved when we were young Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost came up. This brought back wonderful memories for me because that was one of my favorite books when I was a girl. Because I lived in an area where there were woods all around us and I spent many hours in those woods the story of Elnora, a girl who was pitifully neglected by her grieving mother, finding solace and then a future in the woods, was delicious to me. Recently I decided I wanted to read it again. I realized that a lot of the things I try to infuse my own writing with came from that book – especially the omnipresent natural world with all its moods, beauties, and dangers. I found a copy on Amazon and, when it arrived, I immediately went to the porch and sunk into it.

It's a wonderful book – heart-breaking and heart-warming with an old-fashioned sensibility and yet some slightly shockingly contemporary touches that must have been a little surprising at the time it was written in 1909. It is set in Indiana on the edge of the Limberlost Swamp whose dense, lavish beauty is filled with both wonders and horrors – the wonders being the abundance of all manner of moths who flit through the swamp. The horrors being the bogs that can grab onto a careless traveler and suck them down to an unpleasant death as they did to Elnora's father when she was just a babe. Her young mother witnessed the death of the beloved husband to whom she had only been wedded a year and who has never recovered from his death. She takes out her grief and her temper on Elnora.

But Elnora is a remarkable girl – sometimes a little too sweet and amazing by today's standards. She is beautiful and brilliant and resourceful and everything I wanted to be when I was a girl. She wants to go to high school but she doesn't have the means and her mother is nasty and mocking of her unsophistication. I really, really hated her mother.

Then Elnora discovers something wonderful – she can sell the beautiful moths that live in the swamp to collectors to earn the money for books and clothes and treats to fit in with the other girls in her school. The story moves on from there. However, in all my youthful day-dreaming over Elnora's secret kingdom – the “room” with a hidden trunk where she stored her moths – I managed to miss one thing that jumped out at me this time. She was catching those gorgeous moths in order to kill them. Yikes. I know the comments about her cyanide jars were always there. No surprises but somehow I missed that when I was reading it as a girl.

My sensibilities are not so delicate that I get terribly upset by the gathering of moths for collection but as the story progresses and the moths get harder and harder to find – when some become so rare that Elnora despairs of ever finding certain types again. Then she finds these rare elusive creatures and immediately gets her cyanide jar all I could think was, “Hey, don't be so greedy! Let them breed!”

The first half of the book is still wonderful. I loved the descriptions of the foods her mother and her neighbor Margaret prepare. I adored the descriptions of the clothes they made for her. And the descriptions of the beautiful woodland baskets and gifts that Elnora made of bark and mosses and woodland flowers and nuts still enchanted me. When her mother realizes what a fool she has been and tries to make amends to her daughter by taking good care of her I was so happy. I must admit I was a little shocked this time to realize what I missed before – that the reason Elnora's father got sucked into the swamp was because he was fooling around with a woman on the other side of the swamp and, after being with her, he was hurrying home to his wife and baby and didn't watch where he was going. Jerk.

The second half of the books, the “Cinderella” story, was a little bit too sweet but those were simpler times (I guess) and happy endings tended to be very happy indeed.

I still love the book. As an adult I am more aware of its flaws but it is still a wonderful story and I know my writing has benefited from Stratton-Porter's eye for the natural world. She gave me a gift in that and it has served me well.

Thanks for reading.