Weeds (1923) by Edith Summers Kelley

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Weeds (1923) 

by Edith Summers Kelley

Scott County, Kentucky

Kentucky: 6/16

    Author Edith Summers Kelley is the attraction here.  She was a Greenwich village hipster and was engaged to Upton Sinclair for a couple years.  Ended up marrying his roommate, that marriage fell apart, then she married another artist, they moved to Kentucky and cosplayed/larped as tobacco farmers for a few years.  They then relocated to the Imperial Valley desert outside of San Diego- one of my favorite places, where she wrote a second novel about pioneering out in the Imperial Valley.  The second novel was never published, the first fell out of print and was later rediscovered and republished, which also led to her other novel being republished.  Kelley ended up in San Diego- the postscript of the edition I read had an interview with her.

  In that sense, Weeds is just about as inauthentic as a book could be, but the fact that it was published in 1923 excuses the inauthencity, as does the proto feminist POV.   A theme I've noticed from the older novels in Kentucky is an attention to dialect that seems almost Joycean.  I'm almost distracted by the linguistic questions that "Hillbilly" raises.  These days, people recognize that the way people speak in the western Appalachians is not a degraded version of the King's English but its own dialect that is closer to the English of the colonial era than any other remaining.  Thus, a novel set in 1920's Kentucky can put us closer to the 18th century then a 19th century novel set in New England or New York.