Gene Stratton Porter - An author you need to acquaint yourself with

In the last week I have finished 3 Gene Stratton Porter books and started a 4th. I can't stop reading stuff from this author.
For a woman who started her professional writing career in secret (she didn't even show her husband her writings until they were published in a magazine) her books have been published in 7 languages and distributed all over the world.
Her book are primarily about the beauty and secrets of nature. She tempers that with love stories, sometimes unorthodox ones, that magnify the absolute best in humankind. The characters she's created are so pure and so tremendous that they're almost impossible. Despite the character's luminosity, they don't display an unattainable sort of sainthood. They are just regular people who choose to be respectable, kind human beings.
The only blot I found was her book "Her Father's Daughter". The story itself was wonderful, but there were so many intense and clearly racially prejudiced sermons it was almost out of touch with anything in the current world. But the determination and tenacity of the main character was so strong it creates a blueprint to reaching one's goals, making it worth the read.
I think what draws me most to these books is the fact that even though the characters seem snow white and unattainable, they are still struggling and real and they stay positive through their problems. With so many books that insist that life is terrible and always will be, it's refreshing and inspiring to find an author who recognizes that there is good in the world and shows us that it is possible to be decent too.
If you want to read a book written by a strong woman who stuck to her guns and wrote what she believed in, you want to read Gene Stratton Porter.

"To deny that wrong and pitiful things exist in life is folly, but to believe that these things are made better by promiscuous discussion at the hands of writers who fail to prove by their books that their viewpoint is either right, clean, or helpful, is close to insanity. If there is to be any error on either side in a book, then God knows it is far better that it should be upon the side of pure sentiment and high ideals than upon that of a too loose discussion of subjects which often open to a large part of the world their first knowledge of such forms of sin, profligate expenditure, and waste of life's best opportunities. There is one great beauty in idealized romance: reading it can make no one worse than he is, while it may help thousands to a cleaner life and higher inspiration than they ever before have known." - Gene Stratton Porter