Deborah

This feminist novel, published in 1946, is set in the American Midwest. It chronicles the life of the central character, Deborah Seerlie, from her childhood on a Dakota farm to her life as a student in Chicago, then teacher, wife and mother, concluding with her return to her impoverished homestead with her granddaughter. Deborah assesses the different opportunities available to each generation of women: her rebellion against her parents’ plan for her to settle down with a local farmer; her desire for her daughters to get a degree; her hopes that her granddaughter will marry her childhood sweetheart and have a career.

The author, Marian Castle (née Johnson, born 5 November 1896; some sources have 1898 and I had listed her among the authors for that year), had a small-town Midwest upbringing, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Like Deborah in this novel, she took a year out from her studies (aged 16) to teach in a junior school. She recalled this episode in rural Wisconsin: “I look back on that year teaching 32 pupils in seven grades as a nightmare of ‘character building’. I remember how I battled deep snow drifts and deeper ignorance (my own and the children's) and how the snow and the ignorance usually won.” Having graduated from the University of Chicago in 1920, she got married in 1924 and soon settled in Denver, Colorado. Her first published writing were Western short stories in magazines. She began writing her first novel (this one) in 1936. She went on to write three more novels.

Deborah, the central character of the novel, is twice widowed and outlives two of her three children. Her son, Richard, dies in an army camp in 1918 during the influenza epidemic. He had run away from home to join up and she had complained to her husband:
“But I had such plans for him — I won't let him. He had to lie about his age to enlist — I can get him out."
Many years later she did not distinguish between his death from illness and any other kind of war death:
“I lost my son Richard in the war and my daughter Gay... several years later.”