SOURCE: "The Romance of the Tennessee Mountains," in The Outlook, Vol. 131, No. 16, August 16, 1922, p. 626.

In the following essay, the critic outlines Murfree's career.

A generation ago, when Mary N. Murfree wrote her romance of Tennessee, The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, the emphasis in American short-story writing was being placed on local color. Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett gave us the local color of New England; George Cable, that of Louisiana; and so over almost every section of the country. But the Southern mountains and the life and character of their people were then practically an unknown subject in fiction. It was before the time when John Fox had utilized the Kentucky mountains and before the same region had been treated, less dramatically but far more realistically and feelingly, by Lucy Furman in her Mothering on Perilous, lately followed by her equally delightful tale, The Quare...