The Heart's Country

Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1914. First Edition. Hardcover. [a good sound copy, minor wear to extremities, a bit of dust-soiling to top of text block; the jacket is moderately edgeworn, with a shallow chip at the base of the spine/lower rear hinge, little bits of paper loss at the upper spine corners, and a handful of old internal tape-mends; all four flap corners are evenly trimmed at a slant, but the jacket doesn't appear to be price-clipped as such, although it bears no printed price except in its rear jacket ad listing, along with eleven other "Latest Fiction" offerings from the publisher]. (color plate illustrations) The author's first novel, after two nonfiction books and a growing body of reportage. Deeply involved in the radical politics and feminism of her day, Vorse (1874-1966) was part of the Greenwich Village community; she was involved with the I.W.W., and was a charter member of the feminist group Heterodoxy, along with the likes of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Susan Glaspell. In addition to her journalistic endeavors and her political activism, she was (from 1915) a single mother, having been twice widowed, and to pay the bills she was regularly cranking out romantic fiction for women's magazines of the day; in fact, that was the origin of this book, which first appeared as a 6-part serial in "Woman's Home Companion" in 1913. As a journalist she reported on numerous strikes and other labor actions, including the Lawrence Textile Strike in 1912, the steel industry strike of 1919, and the famous Gastonia (N.C.) textile workers strike in 1929; the latter inspired her best-known novel, "Strike!" She often created strong, emancipated female characters in her fiction, and although the romance depicted in this novel takes its heroine on a pretty straight line, ending in a happy marriage, one can see a tinge of feminist sensibility peeking through a contemporary reviewer's description of the book's heroine as "a charming and sensitive girl, impulsive, eager for joy, yet with deep-seated ideals not always in harmony with her impulses." (Oddly, though, the book isn't even mentioned in either Dee Garrison's 1989 biography of Vorse or in Vorse's own 1934 memoir, "A Footnote to Folly.") A small additional note of interest: the rear jacket flap bears a long blurb for Willa Cather's "O Pioneers!" Quite scarce, all the more so in jacket. .