ONLY A NOVELIST, it might seem, could conjure up a figure like Mary Treat. A stalwart 19th-century scientist, she tramps the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in search of wax myrtle, swamp pinks and Venus flytraps. Her husband has left her for Victoria Woodhull, a suffragist who ran for president in 1872. Her intellect makes her the valued correspondent of Charles Darwin and his Harvard-based champion, Asa Gray. Treat plays a central role in Barbara Kingsolver's engrossing new novel "Unsheltered", but she is no more an invention than are Woodhull, Darwin and Gray. She made her home in Vineland, New Jersey, a place that became a classic American manufacturing town but originated in the Utopian vision of a man called Charles Landis. He envisioned an agrarian community of homeowners whose lives would be untainted by the evils of alcohol. Half of "Unsheltered" is given over to Treat and her friendship with Thatcher Greenwood, a fictional teacher struggling to spread Darwin's new doctrine.
展开▼
