SOURCE: A review of In the Tennessee Mountains, in The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter, 1971-72, pp. 94-7.

In the essay below, Cary offers a favorable assessment of In the Tennessee Mountains.

As a purveyor of attractive fictions, Mary Murfree's heart was indubitably in the highlands. Of the eighteen novels and seven volumes of collected short stories she published in almost half a century of unrelenting "literary" effort, ten and six, respectively, dealt specifically with the folk and folkways of the Tennessee mountains. On the wave of local-color writing engendered by the expansion of national self-consciousness following the Civil War, she rode with the leading exponents of the genre: Harte and Twain of the Western mining camp, Hay and Eggleston of the Midwest hamlet, Jewett and Freeman of the New England coast and farm, Page, Harris, and Cable of the Southern quarter. Expressly motivated—she "wanted the world...