To Chaddie, stoic and stunning Olga is like something out of Norse mythology, 'a big blonde Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs.' Olga is a welcome addition to the farm every bit as capable physically as Olie and Duncan. Two weeks earlier, what remained of her family had burned to death in their own shack one hundred or so miles to the north. Nineteen-year-old Finnish Canadian Olga Sarristo enters driving a yoke of oxen. He was sold the neighbouring ranch from 'land chaps' in London. Pale Percival Benson Wodehouse, whom this reader suspects to be a remittance man, is next to appear. This male gaze has nothing to do with objectification, rather her ridiculously impractical city dress. The earliest, hired man Olie, is a silent Swede who at first can't keep his eyes off Chaddie. I don't know what Harrison means when he writes of Chaddie's 'mature resolve as she begins an independent life on the Prairies.' The married couple only become closer as the novel progresses, and the two are increasingly reliant on a slowly growing cast of characters. Under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town! Tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of

Gustav - which made me quite calmly and solemnly So pointedly of the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo meĪway from my handsome and kingly Theobald The world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke Shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, The while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxesĭuly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. That he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all That he thought it was code) and later on found I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed Made a pauper, Chaddie's first action is to dismiss her maid the second is to send word to her German aristocrat fiancé: She is of the moneyed class – that is until Monte Carlo, where Chaddie receives a cable informing that the 'Chilean revolution' has wiped out her nitrate mine concessions. Its writer, Chaddie, begins by describing a voyage from Corfu to Palermo and then on to the Riviera. The Prairie Wife takes the form of a series of entries, written over the course of more than a year to someone named Matilda Anne.

The Prairie Child by Arthur Stringer