Lee
Smith; A brief introduction to
Her
life and works
“Her
stories set in small southern Appalachian towns are animated by characters who
speak in authentic voices and native dialect”
Michelle Lodge
Appalachian
Literature is not widely acclaimed and is difficult to find. My name is Randi
and I am an American Literature student at ETSU. I chose Fair and Tender
Ladies to represent Appalachian literature as a subcategory of American
Literature. I want to expose more people to the beauty of a group of writers
that write about the area I grew up in and the type of people I know. Lee Smith
grew up in, attended school in, raised a family in, and writes about the
Appalachians.
Table Of Contents
Biography
Work
Initial Response to Her Work
Fair and Tender Ladies
Bibliography
Biography
Lee
Smith was born on November 1, 1944 to Earnest Lee Smith and Virginia Elizabeth
Marshall Smith in Grundy, Virginia. In 1961, at the age of seventeen, she
attended St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, Virginia to complete her high
school career. From 1963-1967, she attended Hollins College, studying writing.
During this time she studied a year in France and interned at the Richmond
News Leader, a local newspaper. She was a rebel in school. She was
suspended from Hollins when studying in Paris after spending all night out with
a boy. She wrote many controversial articles in the school’s paper, many of
which criticized her classmates on not taking their studies and work serious.
She married James Seay on June 17, 1967; they had two boys, but divorced in
1982. During this time, she followed her husband as his job lead him to
different colleges in the area and taught English at several different schools.
On June 29, 1985 she married Hal Crowther and remains married to him now
(Parrish, chapter 5). Her works include The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed
(1967), Something in the Wind (1971), Fancy Strut (1973), Black
Mountain Breakdown (1980), Oral History (1983), Family Linen
(1985), Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), Devil’s Dream
(1992), Saving Grace (1995), Christmas Letters (1996), and News
of the Spirit (1997). These novels won her many awards, recent winner of Academy Award in Literature May 19, 1999
presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Lila Wallace
/ Reader's Digest Award, 1995-1997, Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction, 1991,
Lyndhurst Grant, 1990-92, Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature, 1988,
North Carolina Award for Fiction, 1984, Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Oral
History, 1983 and Fair and Tender Ladies, 1989, O. Henry Awards, 1979 and 1981.
Work
Smith
spent her college years looking for a theme and a voice for her stories. She
struggled as she tried to move away from Appalachia in her works. She received
much criticism and low grades from her teachers. Finally, she found herself and
her voice when she wrote about what she knew. Her works center on Appalachia
and the people, places, and situations she grew up around (Parrish, chapter 5).
Smith’s stories center around women struggling to find themselves, and more
often than not, failing. The mountains that they call home usually isolate the
women in her stories. They look to find themselves, but realize they can only
do so in connection to their relationship with others (Hill, Xvii). This is an
insightful look into women today. Most women identify themselves through who
they are to the people around them, mothers, sisters, daughters, wives,
teachers, nurses, ect…
When writing her
fourth novel, Oral History, she realized that using the first person
point-of-view, she was able to give her characters dignity and remove some of
her previous stiffness. This way she could use her native dialect and not sound
awkward (McDonald).
Smith states that
she writes to heal. Many critics agree that she writes on social problems to
help us find solutions and heal. Dorothy Hill writes in her introduction to her
book Lee Smith, “She elucidates the female psyche in landscapes and homes
jarred by increasing complexity and change attended by bewilderment and pain,
and her fiction is a struggle to find healing and reconciliation” (XiX).
Initial Response to Her Work
Lee Smith’s first
novels were not well received by the public. The publishers originally
rejected The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed. She revised the book on advice
from the editor and the book was eventually published, but it only sold 10,000
copies. Her next novel, Something in the Wind only sold 5,000 copies.
Due to the fact that these novels lost her publishers money and poor
response to Fancy Strut, Black Mountain Breakdown (1980) was
difficult to get published (Parrish, 202-204). It took Smith five years to find
a publisher, but due to its dark nature it too was not well received. Finally,
her fifth novel, Oral History won the Sir Walter Riley award and she
began to receive literary acclaim, which put her on highly published book
lists. This brought her into the eyes of the public. Smith had finally found
her voice and audience. From this point on she was highly received by the
public and the critics.
Fair and Tender Ladies
The
idea for Fair and Tender Ladies formed when Smith bought a set of
letters written by a woman in North Carolina. Fair and Tender Ladies is
a series of letters written by Smith’s heroine, Ivy Rowe, to different people
who are important in her life. The most self-revealing letters are written to
Ivy’s sister, Silvaney. She even continued to write letters to her after
Silvaney died.
Ivy grew up on the mountain,
but moved to the city to go to school where she became pregnant. She then moved
to a coal town to live with her sister and brother-in-law. When the coalmine
fell in, she realized her feelings for a life long friend Oakley Fox, and they
were married. Afterwards, they moved back to the mountains of her youth to farm
the land and raise children.
The following passage is
important to the story because it shows the turning point of Ivy and Oakley’s
life together. They were married in 1926 and had 11 happy years having and
raising babies. The first sign of trouble comes in a letter to Silvaney.
Chapter IV Letters From
Sugar Fork
June 10, 1937
Silvaney,
I have been caught up for so long in a great soft darkness, a blackness so deep
and so soft that you can fall in there and get comfortable and never know you
are falling in at all, and never land, just keep on falling. I wonder now if
this is what happened to Momma.
You know I used to have so much
spunk. Well, I have lost my spunk some way. It is like I was a girl for such a
long time, Years and years, and then all of a sudden I have got to be an old
woman, with no inbetween. Maybe that has always been the problem with me, a
lack of inbetween.
For all of a sudden when
I saw those lights, I said to myself, Ivy, this is your like, this is your real
life, and you are living it. Your life is not going to start later. This is it,
it is now. It’s funny how a person can be so busy that they forget this is it.
This is my life.
But now I am so tired, Silvaney, just
plain tired, tired unto death it seems. Maudy is the prettiest little baby I
have ever had, but when she sucks it is like she is sucking my life right out
of me. I am nothing but skin and bones now anyway, everybody says so. Oakley’s
mama Edith Fox keeps sending boiled custard up here for me and I eat and eat,
but I can’t gain. I can’t seem to put on a pound. O am not old yet, Silvaney,
37 --- that don’t sound so old! But I have fallen down and down and down into
this darkness, I can see it all so clear now and bits and pieces of me have
rolled off and been lost along the way. They have rolled off down this mountain
someplace until there is not much left but a dried-up husk, with me leeched out
by hard work and babies. I feel like a locust -- like a box turtle shell!
I hadn’t ought to be so tired. I have worked all my life,
you would think I’d be used t it by now. I was up cooking and washing dished
the third day after the twins were born. I milked the cow on the third day. I
felt real fainty but there was not anybody else here to do it, I forget why. So
you would think that with Maudy, I wouldn’t of been so tired, but I was, even
though Oakley’s sister Dreama came up here and stayed a week to help me. After
Maudy, I laid in bed and slept like a rock, and did not dream. I never dream.
I never get out and go places any
more, Silvaney. A woman just can’t go off and leave so many children. So I
don’t hardly ever get out nor go anyplace. I don’t go to church with Oakley
except once in a blue moon -- I’ve always got a baby to look after, anyway --- and I don’t get down to town but once
every month or so. You know we have still got no near neighbors up here either,
and I don’t give a fig to go off real far visiting. I keep up with Ethel and
Geneva, and lord knows, the Foxes come up here moren I like anyway. I can’t
seem to take any interest in reading, which I used to, nor voting, which Oakley
does. Oakley is all the time politicking around with somebody, he is a real
good Democrat. One time he voted for a dead man because he was s Democrat.
But it seems like I don’t want to
do a thing when I’, not working, except rest. And when I rest, I lean back and
shut my eyes and fall straight as a plum down into that darkness that I have
been talking about.
I have been down in that darkness now foe years.
Although in a way it seems short, like one long day that has
lasted for years and years. I feel like I’ve been frozen, locked in time
(Smith, pg. 193-194).
We see here that Ivy had
begun to question her meaning in life and her feelings for her husband. After
fourteen years of marriage and several children, Ivy had an affair with a
traveling man. This only brings her to realize her feelings for Oakley and from
that point on she is happy and content to live out her life on the mountain and
enjoy her family.
Lee Smith’s mother was dying at the
time she wrote Fair and Tender Ladies. She tried to create a role
model in Ivy to help herself through this hard time. She states, “with Ivy
Rowe, I really needed to be making up some one who could just take whatever
shit hit the fan” (Parrish,207). There is a striking similarity between Smith’s
mother and Ivy’s mother. Both came from cities, eloped with a man from the
mountains, and moved away from home.
Virginia Smith was raised in western
Virginia in middle class society and she studied to become a schoolteacher.
While employed as a teacher, she met Earnest Smith, a five-and-dime storeowner.
They eloped and settled down in Grundy in Eastern Virginia. The culture,
surroundings, and life were totally different that what she had known. Lee
Smith always believed that her mother felt like an outsider in Grundy (Parrish,
167). In the opening letter of Fair and Tender Ladies, Ivy writes that
her mother grew up in a large city, she feel in love with John Rowe, and they
eloped. Ivy’s mother, Maude, moved out of her familiar element to the mountains
and felt the hardship the rest of her life. We learn that both struggle with
the strains of mountain life and the isolation of the Appalachians.
Bibliography
Parrish, Nancy. Lee Smith,
Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group. Louisiana State University Press.Baton
Rouge.1998.
(This
is where I got most of the biographical information)
Hill, Dorothy Combs. Lee
Smith. New York. 1992.
(This
is a book of critical analysis of Lee Smith. I got most of the critical
analysis from here.)
McDonald, Jeanne. “Lee Smith at
Home in Appalachia”. www.leesmith.com/sketch.html
(This
had some great biographical information and critical analysis.)
Smith, Lee. Fair and Tender
Ladies. New York. 1988.
(This
is the original work where I took my excerpt from.)
(Lee
Smith’s offical web site)