Mary Noailles Murfree

Mary Noailles Murfree. From the Heritage Center. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Mary Noailles Murfree was among the best known known and most widely read American novelists. She was born in 1850 on what was to become the site of the Battle of Murfreesboro, or Stones River, fought between December 31, 1862 and January 2, 1863. The family home, Grantland, which was on the battlefield, was destroyed and the estate entirely devastated., Mary's father, William Law Murfree, was a lawyer, the author of widely used legal manuals, a planter and a linguist. Her mother, Priscilla Dickinson, practiced the piano four hours a day and taught her children music and singing. A sister, Fanny, was three and a half years older than Mary, and brother, William, four years younger., The family built Craig-Wilde, their summer home in Beersheba Springs, just before the Civil War, and for fifteen years Mary spent May to October there. At Beersheba and on one expedition into the Great Smokey Mountains, Murfree found the material that informed her most popular and realized work. This was the life, the speech, the folkways and struggles of the Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish settlers of the Tennessee mountains illiterate or scarcely literate mountain people notable for their independence, their violent and indomitable ways, and their dour and fiery religious inheritance., Murfree published 25 books in the course of her life. She wrote under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, but after a visit to her publishers, Houghton and Mifflin of Boston in 1884, her identity became generally known. Her first book, a collection of stories titled "In the Tennessee Mountains" came out that year and went into 22 printings in several years. Her novel "Where the Battle was Fought" set on the site of the Battle of Murfreesboro, also appeared that year and had similarly good reception., In 1922, Murfree was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of the South in Sewanee. Two months later, in July 1922, she died. The times were changing and tastes were changing. The work of the once famous novelist was already starting to be neglected, but her personal distinction is known to all scholars who have examined the story of her life.