The Country of Pointed Firs is a book you can take your time with. It has a dreamy quality, and it’s sense of nostalgia is very strong, as if this place and time no longer exists but in her memory. It’s not especially sad, but it got me thinking of similar events or people in my life that are perhaps gone forever. You can tell that the importance lies in the time, as you can always go back to the place, but maybe it has changed so much that the experience of it will never be the same.

Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening, shocked readers in 1899 and the scandal created by the book haunted Kate Chopin for the rest of her life. The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier’s life.

Helen was born in June of 1880 in a tiny town in northern Alabama. She was nineteen months old and had just begun to talk when she contracted an unnamed disease, described by her doctor only as “acute congestion of the stomach and brain.” The doctor’s prognosis was that Helen would not live. She pulled through, but not before the disease had robbed her of her sight and hearing.

An endearing quality about Wiggins’ writing is the wonderful detail with which she describes even the most minor of events. She is also very clever at describing the social milieu of the day, so clever that one would come to believe that she might be commenting on social realities such as class divisions.

Although Kate Douglas Wiggin is famous for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, she can deal with some remarkably dark subjects for an obvious optimist. The Romance of a Christmas Card is in the end a story of strange coincidences that ultimately lead to redemption.