Margaret Mitchell, the second Georgia writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for a novel, wrote this to the first Georgia writer to win it, Caroline Miller:
"Your book is undoubtedly the greatest that ever came out of the South about Southern people, and it is my favorite book."
Sinclair Lewis wrote, "There is a sense of beauty here."
If I made a movie based on this book, I'd choose spare drumming as a sound track, if any. The book is set in "Georgy"--and the language captures the simple rhythm of the speech of these Southern people in the early 1800s.
I'm pausing at the halfway point, totally absorbed in this story, the language, and the lyrical descriptions of the natural world of Georgia, my home state.
When Cean, the main character, hears that her sister-in-law is leaving her brother, Lias, Cean is unable to capture her feelings in words:
Cean's heart fell: a parting is sadder than a death, Ma always said, for two people are dead to one another and yet go on living--as though you might cleave a body in twain and set the severed halves apart and leave them to bleed helplessly for one another. A parting breaks the sacredest vow that any woman or man can make....til death do us part, so help me Godamighty.
How can Caroline Miller write so evocatively about a time a hundred years before she was born? I keep wondering.
She takes the reader into the interior world of the "womenfolks" and the "menfolks" and weaves an unforgettable tapestry of a time and a place.
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