In the “Stranger People's” Country

by Mary Noailles Murfree, Marjorie Pryse (Editor)

In the “Stranger People’s” Country tells the story of contact between a late-nineteenth-century Tennessee mountain community and an amateur archaeologist who wants to open the graves of the prehistoric “leetle stranger people,” a source of myth to the mountaineers. A politician looking for votes in the country has invited the archaeologist Shattuck to travel into the mountains with him, but a mountain woman, Adelaide Yates, threatens to shoot anyone who attempts to violate the graves. The courageous mountaineer Felix Guthrie joins the defense of the “stranger people” and competes with Shattuck for the attention of another mountain woman, Letitia Pettingill.

 

Author Mary Noailles Murfree (1850–1922) uses dialect and vivid descriptions of mountain scenes to introduce the reader to Appalachia and its people. She creates respectful representations of Appalachian life and explores some of the changes the arrival of outsiders brought to the mountains. Murfree’s depiction of social and aesthetic issues increases our understanding of the nineteenth century and serves as a literary precursor of the twentieth-century Appalachian activist movements to preserve the environment against the strip-mining and chemical industries.

 

This edition of Murfree’s 1891 novel, reprinted for the first time, includes notes about Appalachian dialect and the novel’s references to archaeology, which have some basis in actual archaeological discoveries in Tennessee.

Genres: Literature

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1891

About the author

Used the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, slow, rewarding book, this has been rescued from obscurity thanks to the University of Nebraska's ‘19th-century American Women Writers’ series, but it deserves to be read for much better reasons than just representing various gradations of nationality, timezone or gender. As a description of Tennessee mountain life, it's a real wonder, and anyone who enjoys rich, chewy prose will find a lot to get stuck into here.

The story, such as it is, concerns an archaeologist who wants to investigate a mysterious pygmy burial-ground near a little community in the Great Smoky Mountains. To be honest it doesn't quite sustain the length of the book: I'd love to read her short stories and I suspect she'd be better over shorter distances.

But the pleasure comes from the richly Romantic, even Gothic, atmosphere of the book, which has a powerful sense of the sublime in nature and a tendency to the melancholy and the mysterious. Her prose is portentous and elaborate with an archaic vocabulary. When it misfires she can seem very clichéd:

There was fire in her serene eyes, like a flare of sunset in the placid depths of a lake.

But when it works, the effects can be strangely wonderful, with something of the ornate power of Mervyn Peake, albeit here inspired by the natural world:

the rising [moon] was visible through the gap in the mountains; much of the world seemed in some sort unaware of its advent, and lay in the shadow, dark and stolid, in a dull invisibility, as though without form and void. The moon had not yet scaled the heights of the great range; only that long clifty gorge cleaving its mighty heart was radiant with the forecast of the splendors of the night, and through this vista, upon the mystic burial-ground, fell the pensive light like a benison.

One character, looking out at a mountain path in the darkness, sees how it appears and reappears over the slopes,

…now in the clear sheen, now lost in the black shadow, reappearing at an unexpected angle, as if in the darkness the continuity were severed, and it existed only in sinuous sections.

This is lush, if you like that sort of thing. The elaborate precision of her descriptions seems all the more pronounced for being juxtaposed with the dialect Murfree uses to write her characters' dialogue. The book's first line of speech, absolutely representative, is this:

‘I do declar' I never war so set back in my life ez I felt whenst that thar valley man jes' upped an' axed me 'bout'n them thar Leetle Stranger People buried yander on the rise,’ declared Stephen Yates.

Some might find it irritating; I liked it, once I'd got used to deciphering it. And (as the introduction to this edition persuasively argues) by putting dialect right next to the most baroque of descriptive prose, there is a kind of inherent argument that dialect itself can be a useful prose style.

And Murfree makes the case pretty well, on balance: this is a rich and fascinating book, which well deserves to be brought back into print.

(Nov 2009)

[Perry Eury · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not everyone's cup ot tea. But as someone who prefers 19th century American literature to most contemporary fiction, I found it a most enjoyable read. Her rendition of dialect takes some time to get used to, but I give her credit for faithfully trying to capture the speech she heard in the Tennessee Mountains. Murfree employs florid descriptions of scenery in her writing and that's true in this book. It might be "too much" by modern standards, but her readers had not been bombarded with high-definition, full color images from every corner of the globe. In that context, her word pictures enhance the story. Murfree's vocabulary is also a point of interest. I kept a dictionary handy, because in the just the first few pages I encountered: piggin, quailed, fetich, supersedure, vicinage, supernal and purblind. Her elaborate narrative style succeeds in fleshing out the characters and developing their subtle nuances and interior conflicts. One-dimensional stereotypes are par for the course in this type of fiction, but I appreciate how Murfree transcends that to create characters who hold our interest. This has a reputation for being among her better works, and based on what I've read of Murfree, I would agree. Someone new to Murfree would do well to start with this book. The University of Nebraska Press edition is especially nice, with a gorgeous cover, clean text and a helpful introduction. One clarification: I picked up this book because it was mentioned as touching upon the Cherokee legend of the "little people." Unless I'm missing something, the "little people" of this book aren't the mischievous, elfin creatures sometimes seen in the woods today (if you believe the reports) but a race of short-statured people who preceded the Cherokees in the Appalachian Mountains. In the introduction, Marjorie Pryse provides helpful background on the 19th archaeological search for these "pygmies" and that is a big part of the storyline for the novel. Fans of Robert Morgan or Charles Frazier would do well to ovecome the challenges posed by Murfree's "antiquated" style. The reward is definitely worth the initial effort.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really unique text, and I feel I need to read it again in order to have a more thorough understanding. On one level, it's a romantic tragedy; on another, it's a balanced depiction of both the life and belief systems of postwar Appalachia; on another, it's a measured assessment of varying 19th century types: the politician, the anthropologist, and the local. The mix means that neither the modern pleasure-reader nor the modern academic gets quite all that they will hope for, but there's here than meets the eye. And Murfree's prose--gorgeous, impressionistic writing. Pryse's introduction provides a highly compelling reading of the novel as an assessment of the economics and class relations of literary regionalism as an institution (as described in the work of Richard Brodhead, Stephanie Foote, etc.) that adds to its interest and significance. But the novel equally insists on being read as outside its contemporary socio-economic moment, as a reflection on scales of time - from immediately antebellum to pre-historical and even pre-human - that inherently overlap but always in incomplete or opaque ways. The ontology (forgive me) of mystery more generally, the unsaid or the unknowable, is a a powerful force through the novel; but I'm not sure I can tackle that just yet!