Perhaps Edna Ferber and Gwethalyn Graham are going to be my two lost sisters of literature. They, so far are the two most underappreciated and undervalued women writers I have come across since I started this project. I just finished, today, Edna Ferber's So Big. It was amazing! It makes me want to read all of her other books right away(however I'm sitting on a James Alan McPherson and a Booth Tarkington that need to go back to the library...). On a tangential note, when I was living in upstate NY, working at that resort in the middle of nowhere, I looked and looked for novels about farm life, since I'm not so shyly obsessed with farm life and books about it. I couldn't find anything while roaming the search engines at the library. Perhaps I just wasn't plugging in the right words...So Big is a farm novel, as well as a novel about the development of the Chicago area around the turn of the 20th century. It is also a novel about people and their expectations of life and then what they do with those expectations when they truly realize how life is going to go...:) Ferber's main character Selina DeJong is a great character. She grows up with a gambling father who manages to keep her in nice clothes and good schools even when his luck is down, and books are her main source of her companionship. Perhaps this leads to too many romantic notions, but when her father unexpectedly dies, leaving her with no real path in the world, she goes off to be a schoolteacher in High Prairie, IL; the country in what was then turn of the 20th C. Chicago...She gets the job through the father of her best friend Julie Hempel, who is of meat-packing fame and fortune(will hit for a little while a skid during the muckracking of which of course The Jungle will feature). She lives out there for a year and in that time meets a local farmer, who is handsome and sweet but thoroughly unimaginative(very unlike Selina, who when she first goes out to High Prairie with Klaus Pool, the patriarch of the family with which she will board while she is still single, comments on the beauty of the cabbages along the way and calls them "chrysoprase and porphyry" and Mr. Pool cannot help laughing, it becomes a joke between the farmers for the rest of the book, the joke will be on them though.). Pervus DeJong is the handsome bachelor of the area, and the most desirable, but he is also the most unimaginative farmer who is clearly not determined to get ahead and takes Selina's ideas to be folly when she suggests "new-fangled notions" about farming. Selina sticks it out, though, and it is clear that she loves him in her way and he worships her; but her romantic notions, though not quashed are put aside in favor of survival on a Midwestern farm. The couple has a son, Dirk, and it is into him that Selina throws all of her romantic ideals and desires; she wishes for him all the best and will get it for him. This becomes much more feasible when, sadly enough, Pervus dies. It is she who has to take over the family farm and make the money. She is determined and like a shrewd businesswoman, takes advantage of a niche market in selling beautiful, perfect vegetables to wholesalers who then go on to sell to hotels. She never ever loses her zest for life, her excitement for it, even when she is on the farm. She wishes to hear all the stories her son can tell of life in the big city at the fancy parties, what people eat, what they wear. She even travels to Chicago occasionally for a vacation where she explores all areas, even the places where the blacks are starting to become more prevalent and in the novel it is hinted that the area is less savory especially to the likes of the people that her son Dirk, now grown up, hangs out with. Dirk goes to an okay university, and does fine, but conforms to societal standards, living within them and has no real passion for anything. It is this that does not make him or even his worshipper, his mother, proud. What is interesting to think about here is what this means, and how this happens all the time even now...A parent works and works to climb their way to the top and give their children the best, wanting them to be like them, but perhaps because they don't HAVE to work so hard for everything and they aren't forced to work to survive, they have no real appreciation or love for anything. Perhaps when you are put in a situation where you are against odds then it begins to create that passion in you...I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA. All I know is that when Dirk finally does fall in love(even though his childhood playmate as it were, Paula Storm, of the Hempel line and he have a very significant non-affair, at least perhaps not in the sexual way, but they hang out together ALL THE TIME...)with an artist, her main argument against being with him is because he never really had to struggle for what he believed in, and lacks passion. She even tells him that if he HAD worked at the crappy architectural firm he started at before he got whisked into opportunity after opportunity with friends)and worked his way up, struggling with crappy pay to finally make a beautiful SOMETHING that improved the skyline of Chicago, she would admire him more. HE DOESN'T GET IT! He tells her that if it would make a difference he would go back!!! She talks in the same conversation though, of how admirable his MOTHER is. The woman who still holds her head high, and still works the field. And, the characteristics he admires in the woman(Dallas O'Mara), are that of a working girl(nails unkempt, etc.) and that she is proud of those features/doesn't care about them as much as the other uppity society women that he hangs out with. The most interesting bit is the end when Roelf Pool, the only bit of artistic genius that High Prairie has ever seen, who left High Prairie after his father remarried to struggle in Paris and become a world-renowned sculptor, returns to his first real mentor, Selina, after years and years and years. It is bittersweet and beautiful. Selina, who never left the farm, makes such an amazing impact on all she comes across. There's more to think about there...but I'm not going to do it today, I'm tired of typing....What is impressive though is this is the same woman who wrote Showboat, Cimarron, and Giant, and no one today has even heard of her. She is, I guess, known for her strong female characters. Well here's one to think about for a long time.:) She was also considered one of the most preeminent authors for about thirty years surrounding her publications...How come we don't read her anymore???There's a lost sisterhood: Gwethalyn Graham, Edna Ferber, Shirley Ann Grau...I'm sure I'll discover others. Maybe some day I'll be lucky enough to do work in women's studies and make a course featuring all of these women...Until then, I'll just keep plugging away and discovering...:) PPs-44, GGs-37.