In her dialogue she attempts, usually successfully, to catch the rhythms of regional speech and to give the flavor, rather than an exact transcription, of pronunciation. Most important, unlike most local colorists, in her best writing she is preoccupied with the psychology, especially as it is derived from cultural roots, underlying her characters' attitudes and actions. For example, she was fascinated by what may be called the anatomy of the New England will--that legacy from early Puritanism--which she found in a hypertrophied, or warped, condition in the remote villages and on the isolated farms of the area. At the beginning of her career, she earned recognition for her insights into the impulses and motives that ruled the lives of the fiercely independent, stubborn, often pathetic, and at times hateful rural characters that people her stories.
Yet her insights were not solely in the realm of psychology. She was also keenly aware of the social and economic conditions with which her country folk had to contend. Seriously depopulated of its men by the Civil War and by migration to the West and to the industrial cities, the countryside of which she wrote was one of run-down or abandoned farms. Her villages, where the churches, the schools, and the town-meeting governments had lost their original vigor or seemed hardly to function, were communities where women, disenfranchised politically and barred from the ministry, far outnumbered the men and where the men who remained were more often than not moral and intellectual weaklings.
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