SOURCE: "Mary Noailles Murfree's 'Special' Sense of Humor," in Studies in American Humor, n.s., Vol. 4, Nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer, 1985, pp. 30-8.

In the excerpt below, Fisher surveys the comic elements in Murfree's short fiction.

Placing Mary Murfree as a humorist is analogous to the similar positioning of one of her American literary precedessors, Edgar Allan Poe. His comedy was readily noted by contemporaries; then, for better than a century, it was largely ignored or lamented as an excrescence. Mid-twentieth-century critics, like Clark Griffith and Richard P. Benton, however, initiated revaluations that have spurred wide recognition and admiration for Poe's subtleties in irony and other comic techniques. Murfree, on the other hand, still awaits a similar reassessment, and that in despite of repeated, but too terse, reviewers' and anthologists' notice that humor is neither infrequent nor execrable in her works. I propose that Murfree's comic elements are substantial, and...