The Courtship
Jane Davis has lived in Dixon Falls, Oregon for years without meeting most of the town’s inhabitants. Her parents, displaced from South Carolina in the period just after the Civil War, were determined that she live the life of a Southern belle, and their neighbors in Dixon Falls just don’t live up as fit company. However, Jane’s father has died, and she and her mother are destitute. Jane boldly conceives of a plan to earn money by setting herself up in business as a seamstress. Now she just needs to convince Rydell Walker, the only banker in town and one of the hated Yankees, to lend her enough money to start her business. Rydell agrees to a deal: he will lend her money, but if she can not repay it, she must marry him.
It is refreshing to find a heroine who is willing to follow her desires where Rydell was concerned, though her continuing determination to see him as the hated Yankee begins to ring false. The bicycle on the cover is, unfortunately, about a decade too early, and pointing out that women couldn’t vote in Oregon at this time as a strike against remaining there just isn’t logical–women couldn’t vote anywhere in the US at that time.
