Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), both set in the California desert, make intimate connections between animals, people, and the land they inhabit. For Austin, the two indispensable conditions of her fiction were that the region must enter the story "as another character, as the instigator of plot," and that the story must reflect "the essential qualities of the land." In The Land of Little Rain, Austin's attention to natural detail allows her to write prose that is geologically, biologically, and botanically accurate at the same time that it offers metaphorical insight into human emotional and spiritual experience. In Lost Borders, Austin focuses on both white and Indian women's experiences in the desert, looks for the sources of their deprivation, and finds them in the ways life betrays them, usually in the guise of men. She offers several portraits of strong women characters but ultimately identifies herself with the desert, which she personifies as a woman.

"In the "Stranger People's" Country" tells the story of contact between a late-nineteenth-century Tennessee mountain community and an amateur archaeologist who wants to open the graves of the prehistoric "leetle stranger people," a source of myth to the mountaineers. A politician looking for votes in the country has invited the archaeologist Shattuck to travel into the mountains with him, but a mountain woman, Adelaide Yates, threatens to shoot anyone who attempts to violate the graves. The courageous mountaineer Felix Guthrie joins the defense of the "stranger people" and competes with Shattuck for the attention of another mountain woman, Letitia Pettingill. Author Mary Noailles Murfree (1850-1922) uses dialect and vivid descriptions of mountain scenes to introduce the reader to Appalachia and its people. She creates respectful representations of Appalachian life and explores some of the changes the arrival of outsiders brought to the mountains. Murfree's depiction of social and aesthetic issues increases our understanding of the nineteenth century and serves as a literary precursor of the twentieth-century Appalachian activist movements to preserve the environment against the strip-mining and chemical industries. This edition of Murfree's 1891 novel, reprinted for the first time, includes notes about Appalachian dialect and the novel's references to archaeology, which have some basis in actual archaeological discoveries in Tennessee.

With an Introduction by Marjorie Pryse

This edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs makes an American classic available in the form in which it was originally published in 1896. An edition published after the author's death had incorporated three "Dunnett Landing" stories into the novel as additional chapters; these stories appear here in a seperate section, along with a fourth story belonging to this group and four more tales.

The four Dunnett Landing stories are "A Dunnett Shepheress," "The Foreigner," "The Queen's Twin," and "William's Wedding"; the four additional tales are "A White Heron," "Miss Tempy's Watchers," "Martha's Lady," and "Aunt Cynthy Dallett."

Here in the fictional town of Dunnett's Landing on the coast of Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett introduces people—now mostly women, as many of the town's men have been lost at sea or moved away in this era of whaling's decline—who have lived next to the sea for generations and seem to share its strength, silence and mystery. In prose of exquisite simplicity, Jewett draws a resonant portrait of people creating and tending bonds of relationship in a landscape buffetted by the forces of isolation as well as nature's severity.