Not the famous deer: Marjorie Benton Cooke’s 1914 novel features an unconventional, free-spirited young American woman nicknamed Bambi who invents an elaborate scheme to launch her playwright father’s career, drawing a reluctant young man into her plans along the way. Light, comic, and full of the independent-heroine spirit popular in the Progressive Era, it was a bestseller in its day.
An entertaining early twentieth-century romantic comedy with a distinctive heroine, Cooke’s Bambi is now freely available as a public-domain EPUB at Better Gutenberg.