Most of the fifty short stories that Mary Noailles Murfree wrote in a career of almost fifty years were about the mountaineers of East Tennessee; but the dominant theme of all her fiction is, as she stated in her first published story, "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's cove," that "Human nature is the same everywhere ...." It was not, however, the universal human qualities of Murfree's stories that made them popular and made her a master of local-color fiction. Instead, the particular details of backwoods life in the isolated Tennessee mountains accounted for their appeal to readers, particularly in the North and the East.

The daughter of William Law Murfree and Fanny Priscilla Dickinson Murfree, Mary Noailles Murfree was born 24 January 1850, near Murfreesboro, a town in middle Tennessee named for her great-grandfather. For fifteen years-from 1855 to 1870-her family spent summers at Beersheba springs, a popular resort for affluent southern...