Oldfiel

Published by Macmillan in 1902, Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century is the best-known novel of Nancy Huston Banks (1849-1934), a Kentucky journalist and literary critic who set her fiction in the countryside where she grew up. The story unfolds in the Pennyroyal region of southern Kentucky and follows two elderly gentlewomen, Miss Judy and Miss Sophia, whose quiet routines anchor a portrait of village life in the century just past. Banks works in the local-color tradition then popular in American magazines, attentive to manners, dialect, and the slow fading of an older rural order. The first edition carried illustrations by Harper Pennington and was reprinted four times before the year was out. Oldfield survives as a period record of small-town Kentucky and the social world it preserved on the page. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.