Mountain Women in Fiction: Working Without Nets

Eliza Gant is characterized in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel as a stingy, hard-nosed businesswoman with little time for mothering the last of her nine children. Many mountain women like Wolfe’s mother Julia, on whom Gant was modeled, worked because they had to. Through feminism and fiction, readers can appreciate the difficult lives led by mountain women in the early twentieth century. Novels by Wilma Dykeman, John Ehle, Olive Tilford Dargon, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith, Fred Chappell, Silas House, and Denise Giardina, as well as Thomas Wolfe, portray women whose lives were far different from the stereotype of a Southern lady. Their works of fiction remind us of how mountain women worked and how work shaped their lives. Though fictional, their stories are important because they tell us of real mountain women who worked in mills and on farms, raised children and gardens, and fed families and animals — often alone and without any safety nets.