This tendency is excusable when dealing with well-known literary figures, whose works are widely available and whose lives are subject to continual reexamination. However, it can be dangerous when dealing with a relatively obscure figure like Emma Bell Miles, most of whose work remains out of print and whose life has been the subject of a few, mostly uncritical accounts. At present only Miles' first book The Spirit of the Mountains, originally published in 1905, is commercially available in the form of a facsimile reprint issued in 1975 by the University of Tennessee Press. In the decades since its republication, Miles has begun to emerge as a talented regionalist writer--a significant, if neglected female voice in the South's literary heritage. While there has been no Miles' "boom," there are indications of a steady growth in critical and popular awareness. She became the subject of Grace Toney Edwards' University of Virginia dissertation in 1981 and Kay Baker Gaston's book-length biography in 1986. Thomas Daniel Young acknowledges her achievement in Tennessee Writers (1981) and even goes so far as to say, "With the exception of [George W.] Harris, [Mary Noialles] Murfree, and Miles, not much literature of lasting value was created in Tennessee between 1865 and 1920" (17). More recently, several critical articles on Miles have appeared--most notably James Byer's "The Woman's Place Is in the House" in Poetics of Appalachian Space (1991), a volume that places her in the company of writers such as Wilma Dykeman, James Agee and Lee Smith.

    If anything, her popular reception has kept pace with the critical. In1996 she was featured in Two Hundred Years Through Two Hundred Stories: A Tennessee Bicentennial Collection, published by the University of Tennessee. The same year Nashville songwriter Candace Anderson received a grant from the Tennessee Humanities Council to write a series of original composition based on the writings of Tennessee women; her song "Emma Bell Miles," incorporating text from Miles' diaries, was featured on a broadcast of National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Finally, if true fame means becoming the subject of a musical biography, Miles achieved that goal when Spirit of the Mountains: A Musical of Turn-of-the-Century Tennessee (1996) was produced by the Cumberland County playhouse.

    Yet the ground-swell of enthusiasm for Miles' work threatens to be subsumed in a preoccupation with the tragic circumstances of her life. Born in Evansville, Indiana, in 1879, Miles moved at age nine with her parents to the rural backwoods of Walden's Ridge, just north of Chattanooga, Tennessee. At age sixteen she approached a Chattanooga art teacher and asked for a "dollar's worth" of lessons; at eighteen several wealthy Chattanoogans sent her to the prestigious St. Louis School of Design. However, she forewent a promising artistic career to return to Walden's Ridge where, against her father's wishes, she married mountain native Frank Miles. Her marriage proved unhappy; with her husband unable to secure regular work, Emma relied on her literary and artistic talents to support a family that soon included five children. In 1905 a New York publishing house issued The Spirit of the Mountains, her study of mountain folklife drawn from her own experiences on Walden's Ridge, and over the next decade her short stories and poems appeared in national magazines such as Harper's Monthly, Munsey's, Century and Putnam's. She augmented her scant literary earnings by selling drawings to the local Chattanooga elite, giving public lectures and providing art lessons. After the loss of a three-year-old son to scarlet fever in 1913, she made several attempts to separate from her husband, eventually moving from Walden's Ridge to the city of Chattanooga. During the summer of 1914 she took a reporting job with the ChattanoogaNews, but failing health forced her to resign after only three short months. Worn out by overwork, miscarriages and lingering depression at the loss of her son, she contracted tuberculosis and spent the last five years of her life in and out of Chattanooga's Pine Breeze Sanitarium. Yet she remained productive as a writer to the end. When she died on March 19, 1919, she left behind two finished manuscripts: Our Southern Birds, a field guide with her own illustrations, published posthumously later that year, and The Good Gray Mother, a theoretical work presumed lost.

    The Tragic Emma myth is based on her unfortunate marriage and her death from tuberculosis. "Tragic Emma" conforms to the stereotype of the ethereal, consumptive artist identified in Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor--one of the "sensitive, passive people who are not quite life-loving enough to survive" (25). According to the stereotype, anything that the consumptive artist accomplishes while living cannot compare to the slow spiritualizing process of his/her death. Dying well becomes his/her ultimate artistic statement--hence the endless biographical speculation about such literary consumptives as Keats, Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and D.H. Lawrence. In Miles' case, the stereotype has overshadowed attempts to present her work almost from the beginning. For instance, Abby Crawford Milton's biographical preface to Miles' posthumous collection of poetry, Strains From a Dulcimore (1930), climaxes:

In spite of the hardships to which she was heir, the clear vision of her genius never failed. But   her human frame did fail. The winters' cold and  exposures, the pinch of insufficient food and clothing, the crushing weight of caring for a        family of seven, took their toll of Emma Bell      Miles. She went to a tuberculosis sanitarium.                                                             (12)

Similarly, Adelaide Rowell's short memoir of Miles (written forty years after her death) portrays its subject as the type of passionate consumptive whom Sontag describes as a "hectic, reckless creature of passionate extremes" (36). Rowell, librarian who knew Miles as a patron, imagines her domestic situation in dramatic terms: "when life in the cabin became unendurable, Emma Bell, worn with ill-health and Frank's shiftlessness, would let loose her high-sprung temperament in an explosion that would rock the rafters" (82). She describes Miles' death in exalted terms--"a gallant fight against an incurable foe" (88).

    Roger Abrahams' foreword to the facsimile edition of The Spirit of the Mountains departs from the Tragic Emma myth. Significantly, he describes her not as a debilitated consumptive but simply as "a proud person giving testimony to the positive, if harsh, qualities of daily existence in the mountains" (vii). David Whisnant's introduction to the same volume is also corrective as it places Miles' work within a tradition of documentary fiction on Appalachia (ranging Mary Noialles Murfree's classic The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains [1885] to recent works such as John Fetterman's Stinking Creek [1967]). He further considers her literary achievement within the broader intellectual framework of Thoreauvian transcendentalism. Yet his biographical speculations remain colored by the tragic Emma myth. While lauding Miles' independence as thinker and writer, he nevertheless portrays her as a tragic figure caught between two worlds--the primitive culture of Walden's Ridge and the elite society of Chattanooga. Suffering from the intellectual vacillation stereotypical of the consumptive, she falls victim not to a disease but to "the insoluble and tortured dividedness of her biculturism" (xx). Unfortunately, Whisnant's preoccupation with her tragic decline leads him to diminish or overlook her later work: "After 1912, when the last of Emma Bell Miles's stories had appeared in Harper's, Lippincott's, and Putnam's, she apparently wrote little except a series of signed columns ("Fountain Square Conversations") in the Chattanooga News" (xxiii).

    Grace Toney Edwards' dissertation "Emma Bell Miles: Appalachian Author, Artist and Interpreter of Folk Culture" (1981) presents Miles' final years not as a diminution, but as a climax of her earlier work. While Whisnant gives short shrift to Miles' newswriting, Edwards sees it as the turning point in her writing career--one that allowed her to transcend the limitations of the "local color" format:

Perhaps the most obvious [significance of Miles' newswriting] is its influence on the later writings. She did not become a blazing propagandist for the feminist movement, she did turn more and more to philosophical and naturalistic subjects, often combining the two as in The Good Gray Mother, her treatise on nature as "the book of God." The emphasis on birds, both as personae and topics of the Fountain Square columns, formalized and concretized the ornithic study and note-taking she had engaged in for years; this interest culminated in Our Southern Birds, a guide or textbook which Miles had long wanted to write. The ideas generated for the newspaper columns continued to gestate, then, and came to maturity in the last years of Miles'  career. (191)

Unfortunately, the loss of The Good Gray Mother, which Edwards tries to reconstruct through Miles' letters and diaries, makes her claim somewhat speculative. However, as this present volume hopes to prove, the student of Miles need not pine for a vanished manuscript in order to appreciate the philosophical depth and maturity of her work after The Spirit of the Mountains; both are readily found in her work for the News.

    Kay Baker Gaston's biography Emma Bell Miles: Her Life and Work (1986) also dispenses with the Tragic Emma myth. Drawn heavily from Miles' own diaries, it reveals a committed artist who, despite bouts of depression and advancing tuberculosis, remained productive to the end. According to Gaston, while the dying Miles labored to complete Our Southern Birds, she had already made plans for a companion volume on southern flora. Moreover, like Edwards, Gaston resists the temptation to blame Frank Miles for Emma's domestic situation. Instead, she exposes a symbiotic relationship from which Emma could never fully divorce herself. Though easily written off as the "shiftless husband," Frank was in fact a talented naturalist who taught Emma much of what she knew about mountain birds and flowers. He also served as Emma's vital link to the mountain culture she loved--and wrote about--with so much passion.

    Unfortunately, Edwards' unpublished dissertation and Gaston's privately published work have achieved only limited circulation. The same, however, cannot be said of Spirit of the Mountains: A Musical of Turn-of-the-Century Tennessee. This musical biography, "inspired" by Gaston's work, reduces Miles to the level of cultural kitsch usually reserved for Davy Crockett or Andrew Jackson. Though its co-author George Clinton admits that the play "is not a representation of Emma Bell Miles' life, but a thematic essence" (Chattanooga Free Press 4/28/96:K2), it simply resurrects the Tragic Emma myth: an educated woman makes the fatal error of marrying a mountain man; they enjoy the bohemian freedoms of mountain life, but cannot support their family; they lose a son to scarlet fever; and in the end Emma, like Mimi of La Bohème, is stricken with tuberculosis.

    Of course, the Tragic Emma myth contains a germ of truth. Miles did at times regret her marriage, did suffer from poverty, did lose a child to scarlet fever, and did die of tuberculosis. However, the myth reduces her to the one-dimensionality of a pathetic victim--and reduces her work to an interesting curio like a fragile flower pressed between the pages of a book. It pays token tribute to her abilities as a writer, but glosses over her literary achievement and position in literary history. While both popular and critical interpretations of Miles' work introduce it to a larger audience, efforts that rely too heavily upon the Tragic Emma myth are infected by a subtle form of chauvinism in which a female writer's work, particularly from a pre-suffrage era, must be presented vis-à-vis her domestic situation. When women write, so this approach insinuates, they are necessarily writing in, of or against the condition of their own domesticity.

    One might argue that historical circumstances necessitate such an approach. After all, at the turn of the century, Tennessee women could not vote or serve on juries, and they did not share all the rights and privileges enjoyed by men.Yet such an approach can be extremely reductive when considering the work of an original thinker like Emma Bell Miles. In effect, it has privileged her early work, which conforms to the "local color" tradition. It is not accidental that The Spirit of the Mountains, written when she was twenty-five, is her one book currently in print. Yet, as the present volume attests, Miles was more than a local colorist writing to support her family or to escape a failing marriage. The Fountain Square Conversations and Other Writings for the Chattanooga News, April 1-June 30, 1914 complements the precocious achievement of The Spirit of the Mountains and shows the full range of her mature thought. Within the narrow frame of a provincial daily newspaper, Miles managed to write material that transcended the ephemera of mere "news" or "opinion" pieces. Foremost, she created a signed column Fountain Square Conversations, a unique contribution to Southern literature which welds traditions of the beast fable and the philosophic dialogue. Moreover, she used the hybrid form not only to comment on Progressive era issues such as the women's suffrage movement but also to espouse an ambitious synthesis of Emerson's transcendentalism, Herbert Spencer's theory of universal evolution and her own ideas about women's emancipation. She also contributed a series of unsigned editorials--some of which elaborate the philosophic points raised in the Fountain Square Conversations, others which read like prose poems. Her expertise with the latter form reveals her to be the natural heir to precursors such as Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman and Lafcadio Hearn. Her prose poems, in particular, offer a significant addition to the canon of American poetry, serving as a transition between the lush musicality and transcendentalism of nineteenth century verse and the image-driven clarity and stream-of-consciousness technique associated with modernism. Finally, samples of her other newswriting, both articles and poems in traditional verse forms, have been included to provide a context for--and underscore the achievement of--her more profound and innovative work.

    The present volume corrects the view of Emma Bell Miles as a gifted mountain girl who died before fulfilling her promise as a writer. It reveals a substantial figure in American intellectual and literary history whose work speaks to the general interest reader and academic specialist alike. For the general interest reader, Miles offers a broad range of highly readable information on Southern flora and fauna--and a general method of reconnecting with the natural world. Moreover, the best of her newswriting, full of wit and imaginative energy, is as entertaining today as it was in 1914. For the academic reader, Miles presents a "front line" view of the Progressive era and the woman's suffrage movement; she also provides a theory of creative evolution-- independent of Henri Bergson's--that in many ways presages the ecofeminist movement of the latter twentieth century. In short, the writings collected here are the work of an accomplished writer who was also a woman, not that of a woman who, despite her bad marriage, death of a child and her own tuberculosis, was also a writer.