The Good Earth | O-Lan's Character
In the following excerpt, Gao considers Buck’s depiction of the sympathetic character O-Lan, a “representative of the Chinese peasant women,” and expounds on how the author “humanizes the Chinese people.”
The Good Earth, upon its publication, caught the reader’s attention immediately. About its realism, Florence Ayscough wrote (1931):
I have lived for many years in such a country and among such people as Mrs. Buck describes, and as I read her pages I smell once more the sweet scent of bean flowers opening in the spring . . . ; all as it was and is there in the Yangtze Valley.
Similarly, Paul Hutchinson (1931) pointed out that there had never been a novel that “looked more deeply and understandingly into actual Chinese life.” The...
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