(Excerpt from Dialect Tales
Absorbed in the pleasing perp...)
Excerpt from Dialect Tales
Absorbed in the pleasing perplexity of such a question, I was only aroused from my reverie by my father's tones, raised a good deal above their ordinary level.
Yes, old Ruck is as saucy and rough a tonic as any man could swallow. You will need all your mother-wit in dealing with him. The old scamp swears it is not a just debt, and pay it he will not.
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(The novel follows a romance between a free-spirited, inte...)
The novel follows a romance between a free-spirited, intellectual southerner, Blythe Herndon, and a former abolitionist and Union soldier, Roger Ellis. Blythe initially sees marriage to an outsider as an escape from the strictures of southern society but soon realizes that even Roger will expect a certain deference from his wife. Over the course of the novel she also comes to acknowledge her inability, despite a desire to be free from convention, to accept Roger's egalitarian views on race relations, his notions of free love, and his past affair with a married woman.
Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell was an American short-story writer and novelist under the pen name Sherwood Bonner,
Background
Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell was born on February 26, 1849, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her father, Dr. Charles Bonner, early in life came from Ireland to Pennsylvania, where he studied medicine and then moved to Mississippi, where he married Mary Wilson of Holly Springs.
Katherine grew up with her younger brother and sister under the devoted care of a negro mammy whose superstitious lore and lovable personality are reflected in many stories.
Education
Katherine's father supervised her early reading, and later she attended a private school in Holly Springs, leaving at the age of fourteen for six months at a fashionable boarding school in Montgomery, Alabama.
Career
MacDowell first story was published in 1864 in the Massachusetts Ploughman, whose editor, Nahum Capen, saw the promise of her pen and became her friend and adviser. Leaving her daughter with a relative, she went to Boston, where she served at first as secretary to Nahum Capen. Through him, she became acquainted with important literary figures.
Longfellow engaged her as an amanuensis and encouraged her in her writing. Under this stimulation, she contributed articles, letters, and verses to the Boston Times, Memphis Avalanche, and other papers. From 1875 on, her stories of Southern life and character appeared in periodicals; most of them were later collected in two volumes, Dialect Tales (1883) and Suwanee River Tales (1884).
These stories place her in the midst of the local-colorist movement which was part of the drift toward realism in her generation. She made a tour of Europe in 1876, spending most of her time in Italy. Her novel Like unto Like, dedicated to Longfellow, appeared in 1878 and was favorably received. This story with its background of the Civil War and the reconstruction era is autobiographical in nature and is of value for the interpretation of her character and her marital experience.
She returned to Holly Springs to nurse her father and brother who died of yellow fever in August 1878; then once more threw herself into the writing of short stories and produced several dialect tales of Tennessee mountain life and of the "Egypt" district of Illinois. Her work shows a further increase in realism during this period, making use of gloomy scenes from her experience with yellow fever and vivid details of Mississippi life.
The intensity and frankness of "The Volcanic Interlude, " published in Lippincott's Magazine in April 1880, caused many readers to cancel their subscriptions. Under the strain of absorbing work, her health began to give way. In 1882, she was urged to have an operation for cancer but refused. She worked with undiminished energy into the spring of 1883 and then, accompanied by her friend Sophia Kirk, returned to Holly Springs, where she died.
(Eighteen short stories which reflect life in the South in...)
Views
Katherine's attitude, revealed in her later writings, was one of love for the South, hatred of slavery, and admiration for the intellectual standards of the North.
Personality
The Civil War left a deep impression on her mind. The siege of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the passage of Johnston's army through Holly Springs, and nearby raids and skirmishes were the outstanding events of her life in 1863.
Connections
In 1871, Katherine married Edward MacDowell of Holly Springs, by whom she had a daughter, but her high-strung temperament and literary ambitions were incompatible with domestic routine, and not long after the birth of her child she separated from her husband.