The Bohemian Girl (short story)

Plot summary

Nils Ericson gets off the train at his hometown. He gets a ride on a carriage to his family home, where his mother greets him after many years apart. He goes for a walk with his little brother Eric. The next day the two brothers talk about Lou Sandberg's suicide - Nils dismisses the old man for his folly.

Nils visits Clara, who asks him if he has the second will his father did, bequeathing him some land. His mother drives him home and expresses her disapproval of Clara's father, for being a saloon-keeper. Later, Clara meets Nils outside the saloon; he tells her he came back to see her because he loves her. She gallops off. Sometime later, her father invites her and Nils along for wine and music. Later, at the Ericsons's barnraising, Nils follows Clara down in the cellar, then dances with her and says they should run away. As she is on her way back home from her father's one night, the two lovers run away.

A year after their departure, Eric is on a train. He is supposed to take a ship in New York City and join his brother and Clara in Bergen - Nils has been corresponding with Joe. However, he decides to stop at Red Oak, Iowa and return home to his mother, as he doesn't want to leave her alone in the house. When he is back, she says she has been milking the cows instead of asking a local boy to do the job for her: she did not want people to talk. Mother and son are happily reunited.

Characters

Allusions to other works

Literary significance and criticism

It has been suggested that the story was influenced by Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, as the barn-raising bears similarities to the wedding scene in Flaubert's novel