Aunt Jane of Kentucky

Nine linked stories, collected in 1907, hand the floor to an elderly Kentucky widow who cuts calico and pieces quilt blocks while she talks. A younger visitor sits with Aunt Jane, and out come the doings of Goshen church and the farm country around it in the late 1800s: the Mite Society women buying an organ over the objections of men who call it worldly, a baptizing at Kittle Creek, and the day Sally Ann stood up in a church meeting to defend ‘Lizabeth Taylor, who took twelve dollars of mission money because her husband would not pay her way to a dying daughter. The quilts on Aunt Jane’s lap are her albums and diaries. Hall worked for suffrage in Kentucky, and the argument carried: by 1908 Theodore Roosevelt was recommending that opening story to American families.