cover image Between the Flowers

Between the Flowers

Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow. Michigan State University Press, $37 (448pp) ISBN 978-0-87013-535-4

Renowned in her time for her novels The Dollmaker and Hunter's Horn, Arnow (1908-1986) is largely unknown to contemporary readers. This early novel, Arnow's second work, was written in the 1930s, but not published in her lifetime. It carries some of the detailed heft of Dreiserian naturalism and more than a whiff of Steinbeck's dust bowl atmosphere and social awareness. Set in the locale Arnow knew well, the Cumberland region of Kentucky, the narrative describes the life and marriage of gifted, inquisitive Delph Costello and Marsh Gregory, a loner and daredevil who refocuses his energy on subsistence farming in hopes of providing the kind of security he believes Delph wants. Delph, however, yearns to know what lies beyond the hills and hollows, and she watches her contemporaries go off to Akron, Cincinnati and New York. Marsh is threatened by his feisty wife's independence, but his attempts to maintain authority breed frustration, for there is no end to the hardships of farming in Appalachia. With authoritative ease, Arnow realistically depicts the cycles of flood and drought, ravaging diseases and debilitating bitterness--and the help that comes only from neighbors. Pressured and confused, Marsh reacts violently when a pregnant Delph defies him. Delph tries to reconcile her wanderlust with her yen for stability, but the marriage is ruined. She is a character Arnow wrote about again, doomed because of her imagination and her dreams to remain an outsider. The narrative does meander, however, and in this ironic age, a reader may not know what to make of this patchwork of hardscrabble details and triumphant sincerity. (Nov.) FYI: Michigan State Univ. Press reissued Arnow's The Dollmaker in March 1999.