A Student and Advocate for Freedom

TRIBUTES TO MARY LEE SETTLE A Student and Advocate for Freedom Brian Rosenberg My first encounter with Mary Lee Settle was over the telephone, in 1989, shortly after an essay I had written about her critical reputation had appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review. I recall with some vividness answering the phone in my office and being met with a lilting greeting—"This is Mary Lee Settle"—that caused me no little surprise. Everything I had published to that point had been about authors who were dead—who had in fact been dead for a good long while—and so this unexpected call had a distinctly surreal and even slightly disturbing quality to it: as ifDickenshad phoned from Gads Hill to conveyhis views on the merits of my doctoral dissertation. Though I was initially provoked to anxiety (these writers we write about can talk back!), I was quickly reassured by Mary Lee's generous and gracious response to the work of a young academic. Over the next several years, I had occasion to meet and speak with Mary Lee Settle numerous times, and neither the generosity nor the graciousness ever waned. During each encounter, including a long stretch in Charlottesville taping an extensive interview, she met me with the warmth of a friend and with expressions of gratitude for the devotion of sustained critical attention to her extraordinary and under-appreciated body of work. And in the end it is for that work that I owe Mary Lee Settle—that we all owe Mary Lee Settle—the deepest debt. I continue to believe that she is among the most gifted historical novelists of the past fifty years and one of the few to devote extensive and thoughtful attention to the particular question of what it means to be the product of three centuries of history on our continent. She was also a student and advocate of freedom, in all its guises and with all its costs and complexities, and so we miss her voice today with special poignancy. I am left to wonder what she would be saying now about these troubled times. ...