With Gene Stratton Porter we pass to a different order of “Best-Seller.” This lady has the requisite earnestness, with a very little humour, and an ardent purpose. Also, she enjoys a redeeming sincerity, and a love and knowledge of nature, deep and well-used, which proves, it seems, especially captivating to suburban dwellers with restricted gardens. Her great commercial success is the more extraordinary because of her determined American idiom, and the very different environment of her stories from that to which her readers in England are accustomed. ‘Her Father's Daughter' is typical of the author. Linda, the heroine, is an amazing girl of seventeen. Her qualities and accomplishments would knock the old-fashioned blue-stocking into a cocked hat (the metaphor shall not be mixed ); for, as Henry Anderson says of her,
‘You’re the darndest kid! One minute you're smacking your lips over cream puffs, and the next you're going to the bottom of the Yellow Peril. I never before saw your combination in one girl.’
Neither did we, except in some previous work from the same inspired pen. Linda was, indeed, darnder than the darndest—a schoolgirl, yet an authority on American politics and on world affairs; an expert botanist with a peculiar knowledge of herbs used by the Indians, and a faculty for describing them, and the soups and dishes to be made from them, profitably in journalism; a complete motorist; an artist capable of designing and drawing for magazine covers; a young woman determined, when she has passed her “scholastic course,' to marry the right man and to have six children. And, somehow, Mrs Porter justifies the prodigy.
--The Quarterly Review, Volume 236
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