A Lady Quite Lost

[from dust jacket flap] When Claire Newcomb realized that her plane was going to crash with her up there in the great northern wilderness, she kept her head, loosened her safety belt and fell free of the wreckage. Bruised, cut, and more dead than alive, she held on to her courage and determined to fight her way out.

But everything seemed pitted against her. She could find no food, no trail, and only a lean gray timber wolf appeared to skulk in the shadows, watching her every movement.

She had given up hope of rescue when a white man came upon the scene. She could see at once that he came from her world, the civilized world where men protect women in distress.

I first came to Arthur Stringer (full name Arthur John Arbuthonot Stringer) through Melody's wonderful Redeeming Qualities review of his Empty Hands . I need to reread Empty but I remember enjoying the spectacularly bad writing and preposterous plot so much that I sought out this one, which turned out to be quite hard to find. Now, I'm pretty sure the scarcity's not from collector demand but because women readers in the 30s had the good sense to chuck their copies.

So, Stringer seems to have written three versions of essentially the same novel -- Empty Hands (1924), White Hands (1927) and A Lady Quite Lost(1931) -- daughter of urbanized wealth gets flung into the wilderness where she learns the true meaning of life and of womanhood courtesy of a survivally-skilled man. By the time he got to A Lady Quite Lost, Stringer seems to have been tired of moose and moonlight and in the mood for some edgier fare. He basically says this in an unusual "Prefatory Note": that the story was originally serialized but that he's changed the last four chapters for the book-form,"It wanders into what is perhaps a darker and less idyllic field. But it cleaves, I claim, a little closer to life". Folks, spoiler alert: the "darker and less idyllic field" is a totally unexpected and out-of-previous-character rape of the female mc by the male. It's not explicit but it's no less disturbing for that and it makes the HEA a chapter later mindblowingly unbelievable.

Between the assault and the pervasive racism against Native peoples, which goes beyond what I've encountered in a lot of Great-North-set books and is really just pointless to elaborate, this one ends up high on my "not recommended" list. And it's a shame because I always enjoy a "Swiss Couple" wilderness adventure and Stringer's writing is, otherwise, so entertainingly bad: in flight, there's "a joy...that medicined away the soul-weariness of the overprotected"; a "diminishing lake" resembles "a bent cucumber of amber-green resting on a cloth of darker green"; humans are "tool-carrying wanderers fashioned after the same pattern as herself"; and, once she developed an escape plan, "The pediculine feet of terror no longer stirred the roots of her hair." The whole book's a feast of this stuff and I wish he hadn't ruined it.

Sum: great dj, irredeemable book.