Edith Summers Kelley wrote two novels about rural life: Weeds, published initially in 1923 and reprinted in the Lost American Fiction series of Southern Illinois University Press in 1972; and The Devil's Hand, published posthumously in the same series in 1974. Both novels portray life on a farm as it is experienced by a sensitive female protagonist. Kelley depicts convincingly the cycle of the seasons, the workaday chores, the occasional feast or trip to town or visit with a neighbor which is the only departure from routine allowed by farm life. Her novels are the type of fiction endorsed by her protagonist in The Devil's Hand, who observes that she likes "to read about people who seem real and about what they do and think and how they feel...." Whether Kelley is describing impoverished Kentucky tobacco farmers in Weeds or the heterogeneous settlers of rural southern California in The Devil's Hand...