Her
pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock deceived her publishers into the belief
that she was a man. Both Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich accepted her
stories for the _Atlantic Monthly_ without suspecting her sex, and Aldrich
was a surprised man the day she entered his office and introduced herself
as Charles Egbert Craddock.
The stories that suggested to her editors a masculine hand are lively
recitals of family feuds, moonshiners' raids, circuit court sessions,
fights over land grants, discoveries of oil, and many similar incidents,
which make up the life of a people separated from the modern world by
almost inaccessible mountains. The rifle is used freely by this people, and
murder is frequent, but honor and bravery, daring and sacrifice, are not
absent, and Craddock finds among the women, as well as the men, examples of
magnanimity and heroism that thrill the reader.
[Illustration: MARY N. MURFREE (Charles Egbert Craddock)]
The presence of the mountains is always imminent, and seems to impress the
lives of the people in some direct way. To Cynthia Ware, for instance, in
the story, _Drifting Down Lost Creek_, Pine Mountain seems to stand as a
bar to all her ambitions and dreams:--
"Whether the skies are blue or gray, the dark, austere line of its summit
limits the horizon.
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