This romance, by the author of Freckles and Girl of the Limberlost, reminded me of the novels of Grace Livingston Hill, an author I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

Hill’s messages are simple in nature: good versus evil. As Hill believed the Bible was very clear about what was good and evil in life, she reflected that design in her own works. She wrote about a variety of different subjects, almost always with a romance worked into the message and often essential to the return to grace on the part of one or several characters.
If her clear-cut descriptions of evil in man and woman were Hill’s primary subjects in her novels, a secondary subject would always be God’s ability to restore. Hill aimed for a happy, or at least satisfactory, ending to any situation, often focusing on characters’ new or renewed faith as impetus for resolution. ~Wikipedia

As in Livingston Hill’s novels, the romance in The Harvester is central to the action and theme of the story. The Girl, Ruth Jameson, has been brought low, physically, mentally, and spiritually, by grinding poverty, the death of her beloved mother, and the cruelty of her uncle, her only remaining family. The Harvester, a paragon of a man, carved and fortified by his closeness with nature, sees a vision of Ruth before he meets her, and he is determined to court her and teach her to return to health, enjoy the natural world, and eventually love The Harvester as he loves Ruth at first sight. The entire 375-page book chronicles this enormously high-minded and virtuous romance as well as The Harvester’s views on life, nature, and ethics. The Harvester (whose name is David Langston, but who is most often called simply “The Harvester” in the book) brings Ruth back from the brink of death, both physical and spiritual, by the force of his unassuming and principled stance, and he searches for ways to show her his undying love while never forcing her to feel as if she must respond to his feelings in kind.

What more could a girl ask for? The Harvester is a very old-fashioned story with an antiquated paradigm of human perfectibility (The Harvester) as well as human frailty (The Girl). Nevertheless, it was fascinating. Ms. Porter published this book in 1911, and the atmosphere of the story is definitely early twentieth century or turn of the century. There’s a whiff of fine Teddy Roosevelt “muscular Christianity” along with several nods to a softer, kinder Darwinian evolution and survival of the fittest. We are shaped by our environment and by our decisions, and God shapes the world through the process of evolution.

Toward the end of the book, David Langston preaches to a convention of medical doctors while giving a speech about his work of harvesting the medicinal plants of the woods where he lives:

“I am pleading with you, as men having the greatest influence of any living, to tell and to teach the young that a clean life is possible to them. The next time any of you are called upon to address a body of men tell them to learn for themselves and to teach their sons, and to hold them at the critical hour, even by sweat and blood, to a clean life; for in this way only can feeble-minded homes, almshouses, and the scarlet woman be abolished. In this way only can men arise to full physical and mental force and become the fathers of a race to whom the struggle for clean manhood will not be the battle it is with us.”

Even if you updated that language, can you imagine such a speech being given at an AMA convention nowadays? The Harvester would be laughed off the stage. Since the book is his, however, by virtue of the author’s having written it so, The Harvester gets an ovation and multiple accolades from the newspapers and from the doctors in attendance. And in the end he also gets the girl–a fine ending for an idealistic and exemplary romance.