SOURCE: Dunn, Durwood. “Mary Noailles Murfree: A Reappraisal.” Appalachian Journal 6 (1979): 197-205.

In the following essay, Dunn reevaluates Murfree in light of previous criticism and concludes that Murfree's stereotypical portrayals of Tennessee life obscured a true understanding of the mountain people.

Even at the height of her brief popularity in the 1880's, Mary Noailles Murfree's literary reputation rested largely on the momentary uniqueness or novelty of her materials—the mountains and mountaineers of the Cumberland Mountains in middle Tennessee and their counterparts in the more rugged Great Smoky Mountains in east Tennessee. Murfree herself realized the primacy of these materials in her work and, with few notable exceptions, mined the mother lode of the Tennessee mountaineers to exhaustion in novel after novel, long after her early popularity had been eclipsed. Indeed one biographer, Edd Winfield Parks, maintained that had she died after writing The Prophet of the Great Smoky...