SOURCE: "Point Counterpoint" in Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character, George Braziller, 1961, pp. 122-41.

In the following excerpt, Taylor discusses Hale's views regarding the ideal American character and the contrast between North and South as exhibited in her short stories and her novel Northwood.

The Yankee Ethos in Limbo

The very fact of the novel [Northwood] is a puzzle. What had made a busy and hard-pressed widow living in a small provincial town sit down in the winter of 1826 and fill page after page with the story of Sidney Romilly? Why should she have concerned herself, as she did, with the South? Her whole life of thirty-eight years had been spent in and near the small town of Newport, New Hampshire. She knew as little about the South as she did about the Antipodes. She had evidently set out to paint an agreeable picture...