Radford University Professor Emerita Grace Toney Edwards will present “A Crusade for Mountain Women’s Rights in the Fiction of Emma Bell Miles” at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15 at the Blacksburg Public Library.
Miles was a writer and author living on Walden’s Ridge in southeastern Tennessee in the early 1900s. A mountain wife and mother of five children, she struggled throughout her life with poverty and oppression.
But calling on her own experiences and those of the family and friends who lived around her, she wrote and published 17 short stories in popular magazines of the day, including Harper’s, Lippincott’s, Putnam’s and Red Book. Virtually every story revolves around the common lot of mountain women at the turn of the 20th century.
Miles is best known for her book “The Spirit of the Mountains” written in 1905, an authentic account of the customs and traditions of mountain people, including the role of women.
In 2014 her personal journals were published under the title “Once I Too Had Wings,” edited by Steven Cox.
In 2016 an anthology of the fiction described here was collected and edited by Grace Toney Edwards and published by Ohio University Press. The book’s title is “The Common Lot and Other Stories by Emma Bell Miles,” edited by Grace Toney Edwards.
This presentation will tell the author’s own life story and highlight her fiction through photographs, drawings and paintings done by Miles and through illustrations by other artists for the original magazine publications.
The library is located at 200 Miller St., and the event is free and open to the public.
