The Secret of the Everglades: A Story of Adventure in Florida by Bessie Marchant

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was thinking about how to review this book or even if I should because it’s a difficult read on a number of levels. Not only does it feature the n- word on multiple occasions (please be aware of this prior to reading), but it also has some messy (at best) racial sterotypes, some pretty offensive representations of indigenous cultures, and a plot that kind of literally gives up on its big twist halfway through. It’s a lot.

But then, as I was trying to figure out how to even begin to talk about all of that, I came across something interesting. It’s a letter from Bessie Marchant to Lou Whitfield Miller from 1939 where she reflects upon The Secret of The Everglades and how it was all inspired by an old encyclopedia entry. And somehow, slowly, that letter helped me to figure out how I felt about this book. It was written by an author who never left the United Kingdom and, as the letter states, picked out Florida for no particular reason save this encyclopedia, and somehow got an entire book about that and blimey, well no wonder some of it went quite a bit very much wrong but all in all, there’s still something interesting in the fact that she did that.

So read this for completion’s sake; read this for the fact that Bessie Marchant was out there doing ridiculously pulpy big world stories that absolutely defied the limits of the world she was existing in at that point in time; read it with an awareness that has dated awfully (like, worse than awfully); read it to know what we got wrong; read it for empire literature written through the feminine gaze; just don’t really read it and expect it to be good.

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