SOURCE: Warfel, Harry R. “Local Color and Literary Artistry in Mary Noailles Murfree's In the Tennessee Mountains.” Southern Literary Journal 3 (fall 1970): 154-63.

In the following essay, Warfel says that Murfree is less a typical local color writer than a skillful manipulator of literary materials in the romantic mode.

It is good to have a new reprinting of In the Tennessee Mountains, originally published in 1884. Not only do the eight stories demonstrate the geographical and human substance of local-color fiction, which Professor Nathalia Wright analyzes in detail in her Introduction, but they also make clear the fact that Mary Noailles Murfree was more concerned to manipulate artistic literary techniques than to photograph the places and people. Less than most local colorists did she compel attention through attempts at verisimilitude; mountains, rivers, roads, clearings, villages, and houses have no precise location. The mountain people are types endowed with a single...