Mary Noailles Murfree (January 24, 1850 – July 31, 1922) was an American author of novels and short stories who wrote under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock.[2] She is considered by many to be
Appalachia's first significant female writer and her work a necessity for the study of Appalachian literature, although a number of characters in her work reinforce negative stereotypes about the region. She has been favorably compared to
Bret Harte and
Sarah Orne Jewett, creating post-Civil War American
local-color literature.
Murfree was born on her family's cotton plantation, Grantland, near
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a location later celebrated in her novel, Where the Battle was Fought and in the town named after her great-grandfather, Colonel
Hardy Murfree.[3] Her father was a successful lawyer of
Nashville, and her youth was spent in both Murfreesboro and Nashville. From 1867 to 1869 she attended the
Chegary Institute, a finishing school in
Philadelphia.[citation needed] Murfree would spend her summers in
Beersheba Springs.[4] For a number of years after the
Civil War the Murfree family lived in
St. Louis, returning in 1890 to Murfreesboro, where she lived until her death.
By the 1870s she had begun writing stories for Appleton's Journal under the penname of "Charles Egbert Craddock" and by 1878 she was contributing to the Atlantic Monthly. It was not until seven years later, in May 1885, that Murfree divulged that she was Charles Egbert Craddock to
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an editor at the Atlantic Monthly.[citation needed]
Murfree visited the
Montvale Springs resort near
Knoxville, from 1886. Although she became known for the realism of her accounts, in fact she was from a wealthy family and would have had little contact with the local people while staying at the resorts.[6]
Works
Fiction
In the Tennessee Mountains (1884) (eight stories on the life and character of the Tennessee mountaineer)(e-book at Documenting the American South)
Where the Battle Was Fought (1884)
Down the Ravine (1885)
The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885)(e-book at Documenting the American South)
Harkins, E.F. & Charles H.L. Johnston (1902).
"Charles Egbert Craddock." In: Little Pilgrimages Among the Women who have Written Famous Books. Boston: L.C. Page & Co., pp. 75–90.