Mary Lee Settle, 87, Author of ‘Beulah’ Novels, Is Dead
NY Times
Mary Lee Settle, a master of historical fiction who recreated time and place with visceral, almost fanatical accuracy, died Tuesday at a hospice in Charlottesville, Va. She was 87 and made her home in Charlottesville.
The cause was lung cancer, said her son, Christopher Weathersbee.
Ms. Settle, who was a National Book Award winner and the author of the novels known as “The Beulah Quintet,” explained her research process in an introduction to “O Beulah Land,” the first in an interconnected five-book saga that spanned three centuries, from Cromwell’s England to what Ms. Settle called “the feudal coal culture” of West Virginia, her native state.
To inform her book, she wrote, it was necessary to “let the past become a present, let it fall beyond intelligence into reliving, which is true sensuous recall, where dreams come from with all their fears and future hopes of things long past.”
“The Beulah Quintet” novels, written between 1956 and 1982, were linked by an exploration of the ways American concepts of personal freedom evolved, and began with the journey of former English prisoners to West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley (called Beulah in the novels). For instance, the plot of “The Scapegoat” (1980), the fourth volume, unfolds during a violent 1912 confrontation between miners and owners. The other books are “Know Nothing” (1960), “Prisons” (written in 1973, years after “O Beulah Land,” but labeled Book I because the action takes place earlier in history) and “The Killing Ground” (1982).
But Ms. Settle’s work ranged far beyond her birthplace, geographically and otherwise. In 1978, she received the National Book Award for “Blood Tie,” the story of American and British expatriates in Turkey. She had been living there, well aware of the sociocultural influences that traveled both ways between natives and outsiders. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, Anatole Broyard wrote that the American and British characters were “like so many Typhoid Marys, carrying the disease of change, change as a fever, wherever they go.”
If Ms. Settle’s work was never wildly fashionable - possibly because “I don’t write about being vaguely unhappy in Connecticut,” she once said - that allowed it to age well.
