A Prophet With Honor

The Kentucky mountain stories by Miss Lucy Furman which have been appearing in the Atlantic during the past year and are now assembled, with unifying additions, in The Quare Women, recently issued by the Atlantic Monthly Press, have placed the author of them in the position of a prophet honored in her own country. Kentucky newspapers were among the first to acclaim the book for its faithfulness to local conditions. Experts in mountain character like Mr. Horace Kephart, author of Our Southern Highlanders, Professor C. Alphonso Smith of the United States Naval Academy, a high authority on ballad literature, and Professor Josiah Combs, of the Department of Romance Literature of the University of West Virginia, himself a former student at the ‘Quare Women’s’ Settlement School, have added their testimony to the value of the book. More remote from its source, the critical pages of such journals as the Outlook and the New York Times Book Review promptly recognized it as a notable contribution to creative literature — essentially a story, but one which gains more than it loses from the circumstance that its fiction has a large basis in fact.

When Miss Furman, many years ago, wrote her other Kentucky mountain book, Mothering on Perilous, which has recently been revived, she had already passed her apprenticeship in rural settlement-work. In the intervening time she has accumulated the wealth of experience and understanding of the mountain folk which has made her so sympathetic an interpreter of their life. She is fortunate, besides, in her native and trained command of the storytelling art.