SOURCE: Young, Thomas Daniel. “The South: Old and New.” In Tennessee Writers, pp. 11-16. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.

In the following essay, Young places Murfree in the literary context of her times.

At the end of the Civil War there was intense concern for and interest in things southern. In 1873, Edward King, on assignment for Scribner's Monthly, toured the South with a photographer and gathered material for a series of articles and sketches published serially in Scribner's as The Great South. In New Orleans, King became acquainted with the work of George Washington Cable and sent two of his stories back to New York; one of these, ‘“Sieur George,” appeared in Scribner's in October 1873. The popularity of King's pieces and Cable's story prompted Harper's Monthly to assign Edwin DeLeon to do a series called The New South, and the southern Local Color movement was underway. Writers in...