Between the Flowers

"Between the Flowers" was Harriette Simpson Arnow's second novel. Written in the late 1930s, but unpublished until 1997, this early work shows the development of social and cultural themes that would continue in Arnow's later fiction: the appeal of wandering and of modern life, the countervailing desire to stay within a traditional community, and the difficulties of communication between men and women in such a community. "Between the Flowers" goes far beyond categories of "local color," literary regionalism, or the agrarian novel, to the heart of human relationships in a modernized world. Arnow, who went on to write "Hunter's Horn" (1949) and "The Dollmaker" (1952) - her two most famous works - has continually been overlooked by critics as a regional writer. Ironically, it is her stinging realism that is evidence that she is of the Cumberland - an area somehow more "regional" than others.