With equal enthusiasm Hildegarde Hawthorne declares that _Lydia of the Pines_ “is the best thing Mrs. Willsie has yet done.” The author of this volume has endeavored generally to be reticent in the expression of personal preferences. He will only say that he does not agree with Miss Hawthorne about _Lydia_. He found it fearfully dull while fully conceding the interest of the ideas which Mrs. Willsie never fails to present for her readers’ contemplation. He admired the portrait of John Levine but deplored what he felt to be its lack of solidity. The reader sees Levine in two relations only--to Lydia and to the Indians, and unfortunately his relations to the Indians are mostly a matter of hearsay, what came to Lydia’s ears, no more. To this writer _Still Jim_ seems by far the better book.
But Miss Hawthorne is thoroughly right when she says:
“No one who reads Mrs. Willsie’s books can fail to be deeply interested in seeing how the writer grasps and lays before her public certain big problems confronting us, such as this of the downfall of the early traditions, the influx of races that have not our conception of government or of life, and now the Indian problem. In _Lydia of the Pines_ the shameful story of our treatment of the red man is illuminatingly told. It is told with measure and good sense, and is concretely pictured, the facts concerning one Reservation supplying the material. Those who wish to ascertain how closely Mrs. Willsie sticks to facts need only hunt up the reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners in regard to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to find out. The whole story is there, told over and over again with endless, pitiful detail. In her novel Mrs. Willsie has drawn intelligently upon that mass of testimony, handled it with a full realization of its drama, and also with a peculiarly broad understanding of both sides.”
Gertrude Atherton says: “I think _Lydia of the Pines_ is an American classic.” Margaret Deland wrote to Mrs. Willsie concerning _Still Jim_:
“All the book is American to the roots--but big Jim is the American soul. It is too massive a book to write about in detail;--it’s the whole effect that moves me: truth, beauty and democracy. A fine piece of work--an honest heart behind it. I congratulate you.”