Can you name this character?

I’m going to test your acquaintance with some of the great characters of literature. Here’s a character and writer from the familiar reaches of the Midwest.

The writer who created this character introduced the nation’s readers, many of whom had never traveled west of the Mississippi, to life on the midwestern plains and she didn’t sugarcoat it.

This novel is part of a trilogy and chronicles the hardship and the loss that accompanied life on the frontier. But the story also resounds with a powerful sense of community and endurance.

The character is an eldest daughter in a family that has traveled a long distance to start over.

She is bright, curious and eager to explore the new place in which her family will make a life and a friendship will come to define her experience.

In fact, her friend ends up writing the story of this character’s life.

In that story he observes: “... she had that something which fires the imagination, a woman who could … stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.”

So, can you name this literary character, the novel in which she appears and the author who created them?

When you have it, tweet me @KerriMPR or check out The Thread newsletter next week to see if you’re right.

— Kerri Miller | MPR News