Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
The Love Eaters almost accomplishes [the creation of its own world]. Miss Mary Lee Settle's first novel examines the loveless roots of the small...
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Critical Essay by T. A. Shippey
The long road [in The Long Road to Paradise] is Corporal Johnny Church's path to execution at Burford in 1649, for refusing service in Ireland and trying to hol...
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Critical Essay by The New Republic
In [Blood Tie's] dense and deliciously rich prose Mary Lee Settle weaves an intricate tapestry of the lives of seven … expatriates who with their few ...
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Critical Essay by Anne Tyler
The Scapegoat is, I think, an even better book [than Mary Lee Settle's last novel, Blood Tie. Like Blood Tie, it shows the inner workings of a prodigious variety o...
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Critical Essay by The Atlantic Monthly
Set in a coal rich valley of West Virginia in 1912, [The Scapegoat] teems with Italian miners, British bosses, downriver rednecks, Philadelphia-bred wives, Vass...
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Critical Essay by E. L. Doctorow
Readers and writers who mourn fiction's loss of subject would do well to catch up on Mary Lee Settle. I say catch up because this vigorous writer has since 195...
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Critical Essay by Robert Houston
To some, it may come as a surprise that Mother Jones was a woman before she was a magazine, just as to many it has come as a surprise lately that something besides Wo...
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Critical Essay by Edmund Fuller
There appear to be strong derivations in ["The Love Eaters"]…. Hamilton is bound to seem like a sinister modification of Sheridan Whiteside of &#x...
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Critical Essay by Dexter Allen
Eventually enough characters to provide a proper denouement [to O Beulah Land] converge on an exceptionally beautiful valley beyond the Endless Mountains. Beulah Ȃ...
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Critical Essay by Charlotte Capers
Remarkable for its inclusiveness, [the] historical novel ["O Beulah Land"] is head and shoulders above most of its contemporaries. The author's...
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Critical Essay by William Peden
[Mary Lee Settle's canvas in "Know Nothing"], like that of most historical novels, is a crowded one, depicting a quarter of a century in the lives...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Boucher
To readers of Miss Settle's earlier books, there should be much fascination in following [the] trail of violence [in "Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday&#...
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Critical Essay by Robert M. Adams
Mary Lee Settle's impracticably titled Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday works out to a consistent, overall 86-proof Faulkner. The story in essence is Hannah Mc...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Mary Lee Settle, best known as an historical novelist, is, like most Southern writers since Faulkner, preoccupied with memory. In Fight Night on a Swee...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Looking back across more than twenty years, it seems strange that the educated lance-corporal, whose voice, lyric or plaintive or poignant, added so di...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
