Evocative novel recalls post-Revolutionary era

Though “The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn” is sold as a religion/fiction/historical work, its front cover evokes a romance. Running toward the mountains, dark hair in disarray, her dress just beginning to slip from her shoulders, Tamsen is a woman sought after and seeking more.

The story begins in the years just following the Revolutionary War. Tamsen Littlejohn’s stepfather has arranged a meeting with Ambrose Kincaid, a relatively wealthy Virginia landowner. Her stepfather hopes that Kincaid and Tamsen will marry and he thus then gain Kincaid’s favor and money. When Tamsen rejects the arrangement, her stepfather confronts her, strikes and accidentally kills her mother, and tries to force Tamsen into a union with Kincaid. Tamsen escapes and flees into the wilderness, where she meets Jesse Bird, an attractive young man who was raised in the Shawnee tribe. Tamsen and Jesse seek to elude their pursuers: Kincaid, who wants to marry Tamsen; the stepfather, who wants to silence Tamsen for witnessing her mother’s killing; and other assorted characters who are convinced Jesse was the one who murdered Tamsen’s mother.

However, anyone interested in the history of our region, or the period in which the novel is set, will be drawn to the detail with which author, Lori Benton, describes her main characters and tells of events in these mountains. Though she lives in Oregon, Benton grew up in Eastern North Carolina and often visited the Appalachian mountains during her younger years. In “The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn,” she pays tribute to those visits and reminds us once again of what those who came before us endured.

For readers interested in Appalachian literature, the novel stands apart from other historical novels for several reasons. First, Benton focuses on the few years following the Revolutionary War when the people of the Tennessee region lived under two governments vying for power and land—one in North Carolina, the other centered in Franklin, Tenn. Readers unfamiliar with “The Lost State of Franklin” will find here insights into the struggles of the time as to who would govern the vast territory that today makes up Western North Carolina and the state of Tennessee.

In addition, Benton explores the tensions among different ethnic groups and classes swept up in this conflict through the white’s incursions into Shawnee and Cherokee territories, relationships among slaves and their owners, and differences between older, more established families and those earning a hardscrabble living from the land. She examines, for example, class differences between an established landowner like Kincaid and a social climber like Tamsen’s stepfather. Tamsen herself, whose mother was a former slave and whose stepfather wants to use her as a stepladder into greater wealth and prestige, illustrate these forces.

Benton also demonstrates the powerful religious faith that imbued early American settlers. Unlike some Christian fiction, “The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn” does not beat readers over the head with character’s religious views. Prayer and the practice of reading scripture are intrinsic to Tamsen, her mother, Jesse Bird, his adopted father Cade, and others. When her characters pray or seek some sort of divine assistance, their grasping for direction seems a natural outgrowth of their period and education.

However, readers may find themselves grasping to follow the first few pages of the story, and there are moments when the novel relies on a romance’s unrealistic conventions. It’s ending, for example, produces a series of coincidences that may offend some readers. (Such readers do need to remember that the number of settlers and trailblazers in these mountains involved only a few thousand people and that these people might well run into each other in their different wanderings.)

Despite these flaws, “The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn” is both entertaining and instructive. It evokes the early settlers’ trials: making a living from the land, fighting various political battles, struggling against prejudice and bigotry, trying to follow certain religious precepts and standards of morality while engaged in wars of the heart and soul. Tamsen herself teaches readers to persevere through all sorts of trials to reach happiness, to expect the unexpected, to risk all that we hold dear on uncertain hopes for the future.