The Turning Year
Mary Lee Settle’s World War II experiences lead to her life as a novelist.
Mary Lee Settle (1918-2005)
A Great American Author
Mary Lee Settle’s Kanawha River Valley
The notion of place is paramount in Mary Lee Settle’s writing.
THE STORY OF AN AUDACIOUS CONTEST
A metaphoric battle in America’s coming of age ~ psychic independence from Britain’s lingering shroud at the turn of the 20th century.
In November 1905, the peak of foxhunting season: two tiny towns in Virginia’s Piedmont, poor and nearly forgotten after the Civil War and a recent depression, saw the coming of illustrious foxhunters to raise their hopes. There was to be a contest, a Great Hound Match, between two packs of foxhounds, one English and one American…

On our farm in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia we have raised three boys, plus Connemara ponies, donkeys, cats who refuse to catch mice, hundreds of baby pheasants, pigs and a few steers. Each summer we “walk” foxhound puppies for the Blue Ridge Hunt.
~Martha
MARTHA WRITES
I am hard at work on Mary Lee Settle’s (1918-2005) literary biography. Settle was a native of my hometown, Charleston, WV. During her long literary career she published fourteen novels, four memoirs, award winning short stories, and dozens of essays. WWII WAAF, Vietnam War protestor, intrepid traveler, insatiable reader, incessant writer and wicked wit with a legendary, occasionally volcanic, temperament, her crowning achievement is The Beulah Quintet, a five-novel history of West Virginia’s settlement and industrialization. In 1978 Settle won The National Book Award for Blood Tie. In 1981 she co-founded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
PRESS FOR THE GREAT HOUND MATCH OF 1905
“Wolfe writes about history as if it were contemporary…Martha’s portraits of small-town Virginia huntsmen and their horses and dogs have the metaphorical heft and the linguistic elegance of the many others who have written about hunting before her.”
-Susan Cheever, author of E. E. Cummings: A Poet’s Life and American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorn, and Henry David Thoreau
More Love
“This book deserves to go right up on the shelves with Smith’s and Higginson’s. It’s a thrilling account of a thrilling event, with fascinating background information on the major contestants as well.” Horse Country Booksellers
“…a glimpse into the heart of a hippophile.” Ben Anastas, author of The Underachiever’s Diary, a novel, and Too Good To Be True a memoir.
“Martha is one of those writers whose prose feels effortless…” Dinah Lenney, author of The Object Parade and Bigger Than Life.
“This book is brilliant.” Norm Fine, author of “Foxhunting Life, With Hors and Hound,” a blog, and Foxhunting Adventures: Chasing the Story.
“The prose is graceful and lively. This book will delight veteran and novice foxhunters, as well as anyone who enjoys a good story. Her exhaustive research qualifies her as an authority to fashion dialogue and describe bone-cracking falls in the voice of an eyewitness.” Barclay Rives, The Virginia Sportsman
KUDOS
∗2012, 2014, and 2016 John H. Daniels Fellow at the National Sporting Library and Museum ∗2016 Library of Virginia People’s Choice Literary Award Finalist for Great Hound Match of 1905∗Guest panelist, 2016 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville: ∗Guest panelist, 39th Appalachian Studies Association festival, Shepherd College, Shepherdstown, WV. ∗Keynote Speaker, 2016 Virginia Foxhound Association luncheon, Warrenton, VA.
WHAT I’M READING NOW
God help me, I always have five or six books going at once. I’m embarking on Mary Lee Settle’s huge oeuvre, beginning with her Beulah Quintet, which includes Prisons, O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, The Scape Goat and The Killing Ground. In the mean time I’m reading her first memoir, Addie; A Memoir, and her last, Learning To Fly: A Writer’s Memoir, published posthumously. Biographies: Christoph Irmscher’s Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (Agassiz was Alexander Henry Higginson’s father-in-law, about whom I wrote in The Great Hound Match of 1905 and The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell. Also and including: The Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert; How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. And I’m listening to Kim Basinger read The Awakening, by Kate Chopin.
Find me on the Web:
She Writes: Martha Wolfe
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Amazon Author Page: Martha Wolfe