Thanks, Bookworm_Girl. I thought that the part where old Mrs. Lee visits was really well done; she must have been working from specific memories.
I'm ambivalent about this book. There were things that I really liked ; there were things that I didn't. It was the best of novels; it was the worst of novels.
I did find that on a second reading, I enjoyed the book much more. At that point, I wasn't reading to get to the resolution of the novel.
I immensely enjoyed the descriptions of the land, for example, when Carl gets up early to look at the dawn, and the description of winter on the prairie at the beginning of "Part III Winter memories"; these were exceptionally good.
Her references to nature and humans as a part of the natural world felt true, as in "down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood of one's heart", or Emil's musing on his life as the seed-corn where "the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains of the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why".
Her descriptions of pioneer life are also very good, as in the settlers in the general store, and the story of the circus trees.
Her crude stereotypes put me off a bit; Scandanavians are almost always "much more self-centered, apt to be egotistical and jealous", the French and Bohemian settlers are invariably "spirited and jolly" (except Frank, who should have been Swedish by her logic
).
Alexandria occupies an odd position; there are only a few places where we see her as a person, for example, in the opening scene, quelling the drummer with a look, or when she tries to scrub her dreams away "finishing it by pouring buckets of cold well-water over her gleaming white body". Then there is the odd visit to Frank at the end.
It was an early novel, and perhaps she had poor editorial support. I do think this book will hold up on subsequent readings, and I look forward to reading some of her more mature work.