from "American Literature" by John Calvin Metcalf, pp. 326,328
Richmond, Virginia:Johnson Publishing Company c) 1914, 1921
MARY NOAILLES MURFREE (1850- ----)
(Charles Egbert Craddock)
Her Life. -- Mary Noailles Murfree was born near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, January 24, 1850, in the old house later celebrated in her novel, Where the Battle was Fought. She came of good North Carolina Revolutionary stock; her father was a successful lawyer of Nashville. In that city and in Philadelphia she was educated. Being lame from childhood, she could not take part in the usual outdoor sports; she therefore turned to reading fiction for her recreation and fed her imagination on the novels of Scott and George Eliot. For fifteen successive summers the family spent several months in the mountains of East Tennessee, and thus Miss Murfree had abundant opportunity to study the mountaineer at close range in his native fastnesses. In the seventies she had begun writing stories for Appleton's Journal under the penname of "Charles Egbert Craddock" and by 1878 she was contributing to the Atlantic Monthly. For a number of years after the war the Murfree family lived in St. Louis, returning in 1890 to Murfreesboro, which has since been the novelist's home.
Her Works -- The first volume of Miss Murfree's stories, In the Tennessee Mountains, appeared in 1884. This volume contains eight stories on the life and character of the Tennessee mountaineer ...
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Among the numerous novels that Miss Murfree has written, those on the mountain folk are the best: The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885), In the Clouds (1886), Down the Ravine (1885), The Despot of Broomsedge Cove (1888), In the Stranger Peoples' Country (1891). She has written on other scenes and people, but she has not delineated them with the same sure hand that depicted the life of the East Tennessee mountaineer. This hidden region she discovered for literature, and therein lies her claim to lasting recognition. Past these people, caught as it were in an eddy, the hurrying stream of civilization had swept on; they preserved much of the older speech, many of the older habits of thought. We call them primitive, but that is only a relative way of speaking: their dialect, though a corrupt form, retains familiar old idioms and pronunciations; their songs and ballads are survivals of a transplanted English civilization of three centuries ago; these picturesque folk are "our contempory ancestors in the Southern mountains."
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