BOOK REVIEW : Memoir Re-Creates an Independent Life : ONCE THERE WAS A FARM . . . A Country Childhood Remembered,<i> by Virginia Bell Dabney</i> . Random House: $17.95; 275 pages

In 1917, Alice Bell left her husband, an insurance adjuster in Chicago, and brought her father and two daughters to a farm in central Virginia to raise children and chickens in peace. Without the finality of divorce, it became a kind of peculiar vacation marriage--in 1919 producing the youngest daughter, Virginia.

Now, more than 70 years later, having pined throughout her adult life for the joys and rigors of her mother’s farm, Virginia Bell Dabney has brought that life to life again in an exquisite new memoir. The publication of “Once There Was a Farm . . .” marks Dabney’s literary debut at age 71.

As in “Rain or Shine,” Cyra McFadden’s vivid 1986 memoir of growing up the daughter of free-wheeling Western rodeo announcer Cy Taillon, Dabney shows how a parent can follow a child the rest of her life, even direct her dreams after the parent is long since gone. Where Taillon tried to mold little Cyra in his image (with which he was obsessed), the strong-willed, unconventional Alice Bell reared her daughters to be self-supporting, independent-minded ladies--like herself.

As a child, Dabney regarded her mother as the center of her universe, and the author beautifully evokes an emotional reality that is eerily resonant in the present day as more and more children grow up in single-parent homes, often meeting the needs of lonely adults while their own development goes wanting. Mother and daughter were so close that they even slept in the same downstairs room, while the middle daughter preferred a room upstairs (and the oldest was off at boarding school). Young Virginia did not so much miss her absentee father as resent his occasional intrusions.

“During all these years, my father came to the farm for two-week summer vacations . . . and when possible . . . for Christmas,” Dabney writes. “He was treated by my mother and by us as the guest he was: She cooked the special dishes that he liked and dressed prettily in the mornings. . . . There was a slight feeling of relief, never voided, at seeing him go. The next morning my mother sat at coffee in her old, comfortable bathrobe.”

Every new day meant starting a fire in the cook stove, milking cows, skimming milk, gathering eggs and feeding the livestock, chores performed by the hired help, Mrs. Bell and, as her daughters matured, by them.

Mrs. Bell sold eggs, slaughtered pigs and made sausage. “It was a matter of pride with my mother that the farm made enough money every year to cover its taxes in a time when other farmers around were sometimes unable to pay theirs.”

The resourceful woman supplemented her small farm income by selling Wearever cookware with mixed results, while trying--years ahead of her time--to convert the local farmers from their lard-heavy diets to leaner methods of food preparation. Later, when she landed a part-time job with the farm-loan association, Virginia accompanied her mother on farm and home inspections and shared in her pain at having to foreclose on close friends, one of whom slammed the door on their long friendship.

Dabney suffered vicariously with her mother during World War II when the head of the gas-rationing board “deliberately refused to allot her gas coupons because she was a woman. It was a new experience for her to hold her tongue on the subject of woman’s place in order to avoid offending him. She could not quite refrain from reminding him that she had been running a farm as well as a man for many years. ‘You just been lucky to have Carl Stevens for a neighbor,’ he drawled. . . . My mother, furious at his contempt, had to force herself to thank him and leave.”

Though Dabney learned much from her mother about love for creatures wild and domestic, about independence and survival, about what a woman alone can do when she refuses to accept limits, one comes away from the book speculating about the deficiencies in Dabney’s childhood diet. In a life course that ran an uncanny parallel to her mother’s, Dabney married young, bore three daughters, moved to the country with her husband and was divorced the same year her youngest was born. “Marriage proved to be a crash course in much that I had not understood,” she writes, allowing us only this slim insight into her failed marriage.

If there is anything to criticize in this remarkably honest, affecting book, it is that Dabney’s present-day material does not measure up to the vintage stuff. While we’re glad to learn that Dabney now lives in Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains, she might just as well have tossed out most of her contemporary observations and focused exclusively on what the memoir really is: a tribute to her mother.

If Alice Bell left her daughter any one legacy, it was the confidence to undertake an enterprise--in this case, embarking on the rocky soils of publishing--at an advanced age, believing she could make a go of it. To her mother’s everlasting credit, she has done just that.

Lee Dembart, who has reviewed science books each Tuesday in View for more than three years, has left this weekly review space to begin work as editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner. Dembart, as ambitious as many of the books he has reviewed, also will finish his studies at Stanford Law School in the coming year. Starting in September, a team of two new science reviewers will take his place: Bettyann Kevles, science editor and the author, most recently, of “Females of the Species: Sex and Survival in the Animal Kingdom” (Harvard University Press); and John Wilkes, widely published science journalist and director of the Graduate Program in Science Communication at UC Santa Cruz.