Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith

Growing up in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing-and selling, for a nickel apiece-stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated 'hollers.' Since 1968, she has published eleven novels, as well as three collections of short stories, and has received many writing awards. Other tales about indomitable wives and mothers will be familiar to Smith's fans and round out this thoroughly enjoyable collection. House Tour, for instance, finds a cynical wife and mother contemplating her possible alcoholism when her house is overrun by an endearing group of similarly life-worn but irrepressible women who mistake her house for one on their home tour. Similarly, Big Girl allows an overweight wife who has sacrificed everything for her awful husband to tell her story while attaining the ultimate emancipation.Įach tale is beautifully honed and captures in subtle detail and gentle irony the essential humanity of characters who might initially strike the reader as superficial or unsympathetic. In Toastmaster, a family's dinner outing is parsed from the point of view of a brainy 11-year-old who sees through the motivations of his flaky mother and demonstrates his powers of observation when a group of joking, drunken men enter the restaurant. Smith slips effortlessly into the voices of her funny, smarter-than-they-look characters in her latest collection (after News of the Spirit), containing a handful of new works among some old favorites.

Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith