This one is a bit odd for me, considering The Flying Girl was published all the way back in 1911. Still, it came highly recommended, and I found it easier to read than a lot of other writing at the time was.
It's also far more feminist than you'd imagine, at least for its time. The Flying Girl tells the story of Orissa Kane, a 17-year-old in California who's holding down a job to support her blind mother and her brother, an inventor who's working on his own flying machine. To say airplanes were still new at the time puts it mildly; in fact, the author gives credit for help on the book from Glenn C Curtis, a founder of the U.S. aircraft industry and winner of the first international air meet, and Wilbur Wright, who with his brother did something even more spectacular just eight years before publication.
Orissa's brother Steve is a genius in mechanical design, but the Kane family finds itself in the middle of a dispute with two former business partners, who want to invest in the Kane airplane for different reasons. Here Van Dyne cleverly describes one partner in heroic terms and the other like one might describe a silent movie villain--then flips the script.
Soon the plane is the target of sabotage that injures Steve; and although it can be repaired, Steve is forced out of an upcoming nationwide competition by a broken leg. If only there was someone who'd been watching over his shoulder the whole time, and knew just about as much about the flying machine as Steve himself ... but who ...?
Oh, no, surely not a girl. How indecent!
To say the book's approach to a female protagonist was advanced for the time is putting it mildly. Orissa Kane jumps into the role of airplane pilot fearlessly, and meets all the many challenges that come along with it. Yes, there's a boy, and Orissa never loses her "maidenly virtues", but she's also competent and way braver than I would have been.
But what would you expect, from the same author who invented Dorothy Gale and Ozma of Oz?
Because Edith Van Dyne was really L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. That shouldn't come as a surprise for those who read the Oz books, which were full of strong, smart, competent female characters. (And it's how The Flying Girl came into my reading orbit. I've been reading up on Baum as I prepared to tackle writing my own Oz book.)
By today's standards The Flying Girl would be considered a young adult book, and it also works pretty well, a century later, as an historical novel. In context it's surprisingly advanced not only in its treatment of women, but in its technical aspects--it turns out Baum, who wrote science fiction and invented an early robot and miniature submarines, had an interest in the mechanical.
There's a sequel, The Flying Girl and Her Chum, and I liked this one enough to look forward to trying the second one.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53386/53386-h/53386-h.htm
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1929527241
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"
That's the first I've heard of that.
ReplyDeleteAs much of an L. Frank Baum fan as I am, I didn't know myself until just a few years ago. He wrote dozens of books under pen names, it turns out.
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