Emma Bell Miles lived on Walden's Ridge in the early 20th century, writing about nature, Appalachian culture, and the hardships women faced in mountain life. The new collection The Common Lot and Other Stories is a compilation of her short fiction. Grace Toney Edwards edited the book and wrote the introduction, and she joins us to talk about the life and legacy of a local author who deserves to be better known.
From the publisher's Web site:
The seventeen narratives of The Common Lot and Other Stories, published in popular magazines across the United States between 1908 and 1921 and collected here for the first time, are driven by Emma Bell Miles’s singular vision of the mountain people of her home in southeastern Tennessee. That vision is shaped by her strong sense of social justice, her naturalist’s sensibility, and her insider’s perspective.
Women are at the center of these stories, and Miles deftly works a feminist sensibility beneath the plot of the title tale about a girl caught between present drudgery in her father’s house and prospective drudgery as a young wife in her own. Wry, fiery, and suffused with details of both natural and social worlds, the pieces collected here provide a particularly acute portrayal of Appalachia in the early twentieth century.
Miles’s fiction brings us a world a century in the past, but one that will easily engage twenty-first-century readers. The introduction by editor and noted Miles expert Grace Toney Edwards places Miles in the literary context of her time. Edwards highlights Miles’s quest for women’s liberation from patriarchal domination and oppressive poverty, forces against which Miles herself struggled in making a name for herself as a writer and artist. Illustrations by the author and Miles family photographs complement the stories.
Emma Bell Miles (1879?–1919) was a gifted writer, poet, naturalist, and artist with a keen perspective on Appalachian life and culture. She chronicled her home region through her prolific journals, illustrations, essays, poetry, and fiction.
Grace Toney Edwards is professor emerita of Appalachian Studies and English at Radford University. She was senior editor of A Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Regionand coeditor of the literature section of The Encyclopedia of Appalachia.