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 World War I happened between 1900 and 1920…. But Mary Lee Settle hasn't forgotten. The Scapegoat … remembers those years and people superbly. And if, as it appears, there is a renascence of interest in that perhaps deliberately forgotten "golden age" of native radicalism in America, The Scapegoat's timing...

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 1954 published eight novels that gobble up time and geography and make their way through the bloodlines of family dynasties, rendering the world from 17th-century England to 20th-century Turkey. And though she has had her champions …, she has experienced the peculiar lack of recognition sometimes suffered by strong-willed writers no matter ...

Eventually enough characters to provide a proper denouement [to O Beulah Land] converge on an exceptionally beautiful valley beyond the Endless Mountains. Beulah … is the promised land; and in this setting Miss Settle collects all the budding American stereotypes. Everyone is quite vigorous; the differences are chiefly of intent. Perhaps the most important character is Jeremiah, an escaped bondsman from the colonies who finds amazing spiritual and physical freedom in the Virginia wilderness. He is th...

[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 of a score of major characters…. The large number of Miss Settle's people is frequently an obstacle to the reader's understanding and enjoyment. Too frequently the author introduces a character only to abandon him temporarily; when the reader is later informed that such and such a character has committed suicide, or �...

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 McKarkle's (no kidding!) investigations into her charming doomed dead brother Jonathan. It is a story told with multiple flashbacks into the time past of the close family, the extended family, and the entire sordid little section of Appalachia which is Miss Settle's chosen beat. Indeed, the muddling of past with present is the story;...

Set in a coal rich valley of West Virginia in 1912, [The Scapegoat] teems with Italian miners, British bosses, downriver rednecks, Philadelphia-bred wives, Vassar-educated daughters, imported strike-breakers, even a learned Orthodox Jew or two. No one claims kin; no one makes friends. Lacey Creek is a place where people view each other with suspicion, keep their motives to themselves, and eventually take out their frustrations on the only real stranger in their midst. With seemingly effortless skill Mary Le...

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 of people, but these people are somehow closer to us, less brittle, more genuine, their contradictions and self-delusions more subtly dealt with. Hard-bitten Mother Jones ("sitting there dumpy like a sweet little old lady, about the shape of a keg of dynamite") grows as familiar to us as our own grandmothers. We see into the ve...

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 hold Cromwell to his promises. As an individual's the story is hardly an interesting one; we are told its conclusion right at the start, and the narrative style—continuous first-person recapitulation—has a quality more slow than dreamy. But Miss Settle is more concerned with historical perspectives that the fates of men. Apar...

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 American town of Canona, and in the process creates a microcosm…. It is a patterned small world, filled out and completed by doctor, lawyer, librarian, nurse, college boy—a world which, symbolically, centres on the amateur theatre of the Canona Thespians. Miss Lee Settle measures and follows out the impact upon Canona produced by Selby Dodd and...

Mary Lee Settle, best known as an historical novelist, is, like most Southern writers since Faulkner, preoccupied with memory. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday the shadow of the past falls continually on the present, and the characters move through the half-light like figures in a trance, their speech a long, reminiscent lament. The whole book is a kind of mourning ballad for the futility and tragedy of the South…. [The McKarkles are] a predictable family built for melodrama, and Miss Settle succee...

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"]…. One must regretfully add that, as a novel in its own right, "Fight Night" does not hold up. The writing is largely attractive. But Hannah's quest for meaning simply retreads too many well-trod paths of the Southern novel. The reader soon recognizes each new character, not as a human being, but as an expectab...

Looking back across more than twenty years, it seems strange that the educated lance-corporal, whose voice, lyric or plaintive or poignant, added so distinctive a note to the literature of the Second World War, was almost never female. Why not, when the swathe of conscription cut through both sexes? A generation later, Mary Lee Settle has filled the gap with something more searching, because more precise than documentary. [All the Brave Promises] is experience not transmuted but filtered and refined by memo...

There appear to be strong derivations in ["The Love Eaters"]…. Hamilton is bound to seem like a sinister modification of Sheridan Whiteside of "The Man Who Came to Dinner." There are country-club scenes and some domestic conversations reminiscent of "Appointment in Samarra." The book's philosophy, too, is about on the [John] O'Hara level. The author sees Selby as an incubus, feeding on the love of others—an explanation that fails to be ad...

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 Turkish friends become the victims of political repression, and of their dreams of rejuvenated life in a new land. Settle's portrait of the clash of two cultures and the eerie criss-crossing of her characters' motives and desires is hypnotizing; her accounts of archaeological excavation and deep-sea diving are fascinating; and her p...

Remarkable for its inclusiveness, [the] historical novel ["O Beulah Land"] is head and shoulders above most of its contemporaries. The author's research in the British Museum has paid off in the realism with which she invests her characters. The pioneers of Beulah are not golden-haired hunters seven feet tall, but in many cases are natural enemies from antagonistic religious, social and economic backgrounds, bound together by common danger and a growing identification with the land.