SOURCE: "Mary Noailles Murfree (1850-1922): An Annotated Bibliography," in American Literary Realism 1870-1910, Vol. 7, No. 4, Autumn, 1974, pp. 293-378.

In the following excerpt, Carleton evaluates Murfree's place in American literature and discusses her ultimate inability to fulfill the promise of her early short fiction.

Mary Noailles Murfree submitted her first short story for publication in 1878, and during the next twenty years, under the pseudonym "Charles Egbert Craddock," she produced many stories and novels dealing with the mountaineers of Tennessee. In the 1880s and early 1890s, when a regional focus was popular in American literature, Murfree achieved prominence. By using the Tennessee mountain dialect, the details of the mountain people's daily lives, and by emphasizing the poverty and harsh existence in the isolated clearings and settlements of her chosen locale, Murfree, along with writers such as Cable, Harte, Chopin, and Jewett, contributed to the development of realism in American fiction...