Photo courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

Stumbling onto Mary Lee Settle’s work was a definitive moment in my life. I was browsing in the stacks of the Washington, D.C., Public Library in 1995, and I spotted a book titled O Beulah Land. Having grown up singing the hymn, I couldn’t resist a peek at the book. The moment I opened it and began to scan its pages, I knew I had “come home,” as the old hymns say. I had found a writer not only to read, to admire, but also to learn from. I had found my mentor.

It turns out Settle and I have several things in common. We were both born in West Virginia, a state better known for producing coal miners than writers. Neither of us still lives in West Virginia, but we return to it in our minds, writing about the people and culture that shaped us. We’ve both lived in Charlottesville, Virginia — once at the same time. We even have multiple Methodist ministers in our family trees. I can only wonder why it took me so long to find her.

Settle’s first novel, The Love Eaters, was published 1954; altogether she has published 13 novels and three memoirs. Her backlist is owned by the University of South Carolina Press, and most of her work remains in print. In 1978 she received the coveted National Book Award for her novel Blood Tie. She has received numerous honors, including grants from the Guggenheim and Merrill foundations. She founded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Still, talk about books and writing and she is rarely mentioned. Talk about West Virginia writers and plenty come up, but rarely is Settle one of them. Talk about writers who are political as well as imaginative, and there are many on the list, but I have never seen Settle there. Look in the many publications devoted to Southern fiction, and only occasionally will you find her name. The answer to why she has been overlooked isn’t a simple one. But then, Settle is not simple, nor are her books.

She is probably best known for a collection of five novels commonly grouped together as “The Beulah Quintet.” Spanning from Cromwellian England to 1970s West Virginia, the quintet is as huge a canvas as any writer could envision. Settle creates a world large enough to beget irony and hope as well as multiple generations, a world small enough to maintain a sense of kinship and personal history. In its completed form, the quintet is generally read chronologically according to the period in which the books are set, rather than in the order they were written. The final quintet is comprised of Prisons (published in 1973), O Beulah Land (1956), Know Nothing (1960), The Scapegoat (1980) and The Killing Ground (1982). But, while the whole is easily grasped retrospect, it wasn’t easily conceived.

Prisons, the chronological first of the Beulah novels, was actually the third to be published. It is the only one set outside America, and it draws upon Settle’s curiosity about where our notions of democracy came from. The book is in many ways a quixotic quest: The hero of the story, Johnny Church, is, at 20 years old, searching for an ideal world. The son of landed gentry, he begins his rebellion by joining with Cromwell in the hope of creating a new England from the ground up. But politics is a dirty game, and Cromwell is not the man for the task, as Johnny (and history) tells us. Johnny dies in an almost sacrificial slaughter by a firing squad from Cromwell’s forces outside a small church. But he has lived long enough to have fathered a child and to have instilled in those around him a sense of the ideals for which he dies — dreams and hopes that will carry the generations after him across an ocean and into the new colony of Virginia. While Johnny stands against the rough stone wall of the church thinking himself a failure, the reader knows that for his descendents, the journey has only begun.

O Beulah Land comes second on the series’ timeline, though it was the first to be written. It features a cast of characters ranging from Virginia Cavaliers to the dregs of society — indentured servants, prison convicts and soldiers of fortune. All of these people, representing the first wave of immigrants to what would become the United States, will mingle and marry, creating in a sense a new “family.” They are by turns land-hungry and fearful of the land itself. They are naive in the ways of pioneering, and create nostalgia and myth as they carve out homesteads and clear the land. More than anything, the characters of this book are alone, struggling to find some sense of community and knowing that corruption under such communal conditions is what they were trying to escape.

There is a strangeness to these two books, stemming from the settings. It’s unfamiliar terrain for the contemporary reader, and Settle is meticulous in her detail. Even the language of the novels is constrained by the world in which the characters live; cadence and rhythm, grammar choices and sentence structure — every word is time- and place-appropriate. Rather than simply going back into the past and retelling history for modern readers, as most historical writers are content to do, Settle attempts to create stories that are of their time in every sense.

With Know Nothing, the third novel in the series (though the second one published), the reader is on somewhat more familiar ground. The book is set just before the outbreak of the Civil War, and in proper border-state fashion, the characters debate issues of whether or not to fight, for whom to fight, and why. But oddly enough, the familiarity of the time and setting worked against Settle rather than for her. Historical novels are treated as serious fiction today, but such was not the case when Know Nothing was published, so what she might have gained in readability by writing a Civil War novel, she lost in credibility. She recalled in one interview:

The noses turned up all over the place, and I lost what reputation I was building.  Mind you now, I must be fair, O Beulah Land was extremely well received, and it has very seldom been out of print since 1956. But still, the literary snobs and politicians thought I had made a terrible mistake. I remember people saying to me, “You just can’t do that.” You know, “You’ll ruin your reputation,” and “It’s such a debased genre,” and all that.

When Know Nothing was published in 1960, the reviews were scathing — not so much in regard to the book itself, but the time and place it represented. One critic damned it with faint praise, as a “welcome contrast to the mass of ... historical romances designed for those who prefer to read lying down.” Another wrote of the novel as though Settle was trying to cash in on a lucrative and popular genre, dismissing her work as having been written for “voracious readers who must read everything about the Civil War, and for those who have never gotten over Gone With the Wind.”

Following the pioneers of O Beulah Land and the Civil War soldiers of Know Nothing, Settle wrote what she thought would be the final work of a trilogy of Beulah books. Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday was an attempt to bring the Beulah families into the present. By her own admission, the book was a failure, due in part to editorial conflicts, but also because she hadn’t known enough about the characters to write them fully. The weak book made the Beulah trilogy even less critically respectable. Today, Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday is out of print and is not considered part of the final quintet.

This struggle Settle was having with the Beulah books might explain why she put them aside for a time. During the 1960s, she wrote several works of nonfiction — most notably a memoir of her time in the women’s auxiliary of the Royal Air Force during World War II. Called All the Brave Promises, it was published in 1966, followed by several books for older children, including a history of the Scopes Trial. She also concentrated on teaching, serving for a number of years at Bard College.

A passionate liberal, Settle vowed to leave the United States if Nixon became president; she went to London after the 1968 election. Perhaps being away from the U.S. gave her the freedom to explore the ideals she believed had been present since the nation’s founding. It was in London that she began what would become Prisons, no doubt feeling a bit like Johnny Church: an idealist attempting to create something new after everyone had told her it was doomed to failure. Prisons was published in 1973, while she was still overseas. The reviews were not as savage, but they were few.

After living abroad for many years, first in England and then in Turkey, Settle published the novel that salvaged her literary reputation, but that is almost forgotten today — Blood Tie.  With an expatriate cast of characters, a touch of Twain’s Innocents Abroad in its wry humor and sharp irony, and situations as complex as those found in any F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, Blood Tie is the sort of literary experience that the establishment loves best. And so in 1978, after almost 18 years of mixed reviews and a “failed” series of historical books, Mary Lee Settle finally received some of the acclaim that she deserved, by winning the National Book Award.

Bolstered by the award, Settle returned to the U.S. and to the Beulah series with book four, The Scapegoat. It received tremendous reviews, including front page coverage in The New York Times Book Review. Robert Houston, writing for The Nation, called it “as good a novel as anyone writing in this country today could have written.” What had changed? Was it Settle’s writing? Was it the critical community? Had enough time passed from the 1960s to allow historical fiction to be taken seriously?

The answer to this, in part, was that the world had changed drastically, not only regarding literature, but in terms of the zeitgeist. This was now a world more liberal than conservative, and Settle’s work had begun to find an audience interested in recreations of the past and in changing the future. The Scapegoat, set in 1912, was a story about the West Virginia Mine Wars. This was in no way a “costume drama,” but a work about what it means to be free, and what the cost of that freedom was. This was a book about the working man, written just as the progressive era was about to come to a screeching halt with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.

Settle must have been aware that the world had indeed swung back again, for in 1982, she published the final book of the quintet, The Killing Ground. Much of the material for the book was taken from Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, but here Settle created Hannah McKarkle, introduced as the author of a series of books called “The Beulah Quintet.”

The creation of Hannah has two effects. First, the books cease being autonomous creations and become a single whole. No reader of the quintet could possibly read The Killing Ground without hearing the historical “echo” that Settle creates. The reader, through the creator, Hannah, has the benefit of seeing how history works together and falls apart, how the characters make brave decisions that move them forward, and also poor choices that leave them and their descendents confused and, in the case of Hannah’s brother, dead at the hands of his own distant kin.

The second effect is more complex, and perhaps more personal. By creating a character who takes up the role of Settle herself, she acknowledges that the world is a sort of “wheel of fortune” that spins us about, allowing us to create something seemingly new, only to realize that everything has been said and done before. The past is not always past, as the old saying goes, but the reader must also accept that the moment we acknowledge the present, we relegate it to the past — and that by deciding what to tell, and what to leave out, we help shape the future. Perhaps the best example of this is when Settle begins O Beulah Land, set in 1754, with an epigraph taken from one of the most popular books of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Having returned to a world where liberalism and idealism are reproached, Settle remained steadfast in her belief that the past shapes not only who we have been, but who we will become. An interviewer once asked her if she didn’t have some kernel of truth about the past that she was trying to write about. “No, I didn’t have it,” she answered simply. “I was trying to find it.”

Since the completion of the Beulah Quintet, Settle’s work has become more overtly political. Choices, a novel published in 1996, is the story of a woman who moves from one liberal cause to another, “failing” in the way that Johnny Church failed, succeeding because we read her story and remember not only who she was, but why she was. The book itself is dedicated:

To Southern liberals, past and
present, wherever they may be

Settle has published two books in the past few years: a fictionalized “fragment of autobiography” of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, and a memoir of her childhood and ancestry, titled Addie. It is in this last volume that we begin to see the past of Mary Lee Settle, the person, the writer, the artist. Named for her grandmother, Addie is the story of the personal made political, the political, personal. The work begins:

Old choices, not my own, set me down in one place and not in another.

Old habits I had not made clung to me.

Old decisions, old quarrels, old disguises were my inheritance.

To honor them, recall them, present them, and to admit my love, is to cast them off at last.

In many ways, Addie is the nonfiction corollary to Choices. In Addie we catch real-life glimpses of the people who make up the characters of Settle’s fiction, the good, the bad, the ugly and the blessed. But no matter their sins or stars, these are all her family, her kin, symbolizing the interconnectedness of American family at large. Our kin. Our blood ties, created by our own choices.

Perhaps the culture will roll around again, as it did in the 1970s, and Mary Lee Settle will find the readership that is her due as a great American writer. Perhaps someday the things that her characters have fought for and against will seem as quaint and far removed from us as the harsh realities — gallows and stockades, horse thieves and star chambers — that once made up Cromwellian, Elizabethan and pioneer life. But until then, Settle keeps writing. She keeps standing there before us, like those old Methodist ministers of days gone by, telling us her story, teaching us our lesson, in hopes that someday, sometime, we will answer the call.

Books by Mary Lee Settle:
The Love Eaters (1954)
The Kiss of Kin (1955)
O Beulah Land (1956)
Know Nothing (1956)
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday (1960)
All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391 (1966)
The Story of Flight (1967)
The Clam Shell (1971)
The Scopes Trial: The State of TN v. John Thomas Scopes (1972)
Prisons (1973)
Blood Tie (1977)
The Scapegoat (1980)
The Killing Ground (1982)
Water World (1984)
Celebration (1986)
Charley Bland (1989)
Turkish Reflections (1991)
Choices (1996)
Addie: A Memoir (1998)
I, Roger Williams: A Novel (2001)
Spanish Recognitions: The Road from the Past (2004)
Learning to Fly: A Writer’s Memoir (2007)