SOURCE: "The Visitants from Yesterday': An Atypical, Previously Unpublished Story from the Pen of 'Charles Egbert Craddock'," in Tennessee Studies in Literature, Vol. 26, 1981, pp. 89-100.

Fisher is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he provides a thematic and stylistic overview of Murfree's "The Visitants from Yesterday."

The name "Charles Egbert Craddock," Mary Noailles Murfree's familiar pseudonym, inevitably suggests the Tennessee mountains and mountaineers. Indeed she may be called the laureate of the Great Smokies. Less commonly known are her writings that delineate Mississippi and, in fewer cases, other environs; and, perhaps more significant, her fiction in the supernatural vein. .. . [A] story entitled "The Visitants from Yesterday," throws a larger perspective upon Murfree's authorial talents. It is neither mountain nor outdoors fiction, has none of those famous digressions into rhapsodizing upon natural phenomena that have so exercised contemporaneous reviewers and more recent students, and, finally, resembles...