User:Jjjim/Emma Bell Miles

Emma Bell Miles was a writer, poet, and artist whose works capture the essence of the natural world and the culture of Southern Appalachia. She was born in Kentucky in 1879 and moved to the area that is now Red Bank, Tennessee when she was a young child. Later, she and her family moved to Walden's Ridge (now Signal Mountain), Tennessee. She was a talented young woman and left home to studied art in St. Louis, Missouri. However, she fell in love with a young man named Frank Miles and moved back to Walden's Ridge to become his wife. She and Frank struggled to make ends meet, and often times their major source of income was from the short stories and poems Emma sold to magazines such as Harper's Weekly. Emma's major success was The Spirit of the Mountains published in 1905. This genre-defying book has elements of local color, short story, travel narrative, personal memoir, and cultural analysis. Her other works include Our Southern Birds and Our Southern Flowers. She also wrote several articles for local newspapers, the most popular of which were entitled The Fountain Square Conversations, a fanciful series in which birds gather at a fireman's memorial fountain in downtown Chattanooga and have philosophical conversations on life. A fourth book, presumably focused on nature, The Good Gray Mother, was never published and the manuscript has been lost. Emma and Frank had a difficult marriage. They and their children often suffered from poverty and hunger, and Emma was very bitter about Frank's unwillingness to find work to support the family. The separated a number of times, and Emma was at times taken in by prominent members of Chattanooga society. Emma proved to be a darling of society, and she often gave lectures which were highly regarded and well-received. Emma also held the post of writer in residence at Lincoln Memorial University for a while. Yet no matter how much Emma enjoyed the intellectual life of the city, she always returned to her simple life on the mountain with her husband. Yet this life of continual poverty eroded Emma Bell Miles's health and she died from tuberculosis in a sanitorium in 1919. She was buried in a simple grave in Red Bank, Tennessee. The major scholarly source on Emma Bell Miles's life is the biography, Emma Bell Miles by Kay Baker Gaston published by the Walden's Ridge Historical society. The Spirit of the Mountains has been republished in a facsimile edition by the University of Tennessee Press.