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To the Georgia group belongs in reality Mary Noailles Murfree, better known as Charles Egbert Craddock. Tennessee, her native State—she was born at Murfreesboro in 1850—was of Georgia settlement. On one side of the border as on the other one found a certain wild independence and originality and crude democracy, the same that voiced itself in Longstreet and Thompson, and later in Johnston and Harris. Moreover, the mountains of the Craddock tales lie along the Georgia border and their inhabitants are the same people who figured in Longstreet's "Gander Pulling" and furnished Gorm Smallin and Teague Poteet for Lanier and Harris.
During the seventeen years of her later childhood and youth, or from 1856 to 1873, Miss Murfree lived at Nashville, Tennessee, where her father had an extensive legal practice, and then until 1882 she made her home at St. Louis, Missouri. She was, therefore, unlike Johnston and Harris, metropolitan in training and in point of view. Lameness and a certain frailness of physique caused by a fever debarred her from the activities of childhood and drove her in upon herself for entertainment. She was precocious and she read enormously, pursuing her studies even into the French and the Italian. Later she attended the academy at Nashville and then a seminary at Philadelphia, and, on her return home, even began the study of law in her father's library.
For such a woman, especially in the seventies, literature as a profession was inevitable. She began to write early and some of her apprentice papers, signed even then with the pen name Charles E. Craddock, found publication, notably a few sketches and tales in the weekly Appleton's Journal. It was conventional work and it promised little. Between a sketch like "Taking the Blue Ribbon at the Fair" and "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove," which appeared in the May issue of the Atlantic, 1878, there is a gulf that even yet has not been fully explained. Undoubtedly the early models that influenced her were George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Bret Harte, but she has preserved little of her transition work. She came unheralded with her art fully matured. Whoever may have been her early masters, she was from the first autochthonic in style and material and in the atmosphere that she threw over all that she wrote. There was a newness to her work, a tang of the wild and elemental in the dialect, a convincing quality to the backgrounds painted in sentences like "An early moon was riding, clear and full, over this wild spur of the Alleghanies," that excited wide comment. It was not until 1884, however, that the new author may be said definitely to have arrived, for it was not until then that her stories were given the dignity of book form.
With the publication of In the Tennessee Mountains came one of the most dramatic happenings that ever gave wings to a new book. Charles Egbert Craddock visited the Atlantic office and, to the amazement of Aldrich and Howells and Dr. Holmes, he was a woman. The sensation, coming as it did from the center of the old New England tradition, gave the book at once an international fame and made Charles Egbert Craddock a name as widely known as Dr. Holmes. She followed her early success with a long series of Tennessee mountain novels. Six of them—The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, In the Clouds, The Despot of Broomsedge Cove, His Vanished Star, The Mystery of Witchface Mountain, and The Juggler—first appeared serially in the Atlantic, and, for a time at least, it seemed as if her work had taken its place among the American classics.