Frances Hodgson Burnett
(1849-1924)

While she is not to be considered a western North Carolina author, she did write about the area and also visited the state in 1877.  It was while she was on vacation in the Chimney Rock area that she wrote one of her most famous works,  "Esmeralda." While vacationing in the Chimney Rock area in 1877 she stayed at "Logan's" mentioned in most of the early accounts of the area. "Logan's" named for its owner Judge George Washington Logan, a Confederate congressman, was, like the near-by Sherrill's Inn, a way-station for the stage-coach traffic that made its way back and forth  through Hickory Nut Gap into the Asheville basin. Logan's was later re-named Harris Inn, and remained an inn until recently when the privately owned house closed and only made the cottages on the property available.  Substantially remodeled, the inn is today known as Pine Gables. Judge Logan was most likely in residence when Burnett  came there to stay. We get our information from the account in  Margaret Morleys The Carolina Mountains, written some years later in 1913.

"Esmeralda," the short story that was later turned into a play in four acts, is set in Paris, France. While the story of "Esmeralda" does not describe the mountains of western  North Carolina, the author has evoked the mystery and the yearning for those mountains to such a degree in her story that the mountains run like a sub-plot throughout the simple tale. Essentially the plot is of two lovers pulled apart by a grasping mother who want to raise her daughter's cultural level and standing in society. Using money that came from an iron [?] mine on their North Carolina property, the parents take the daughter to Paris where she pines away. Her lover soon follows her to Paris where his health fails and the mother refuses to allow the two to see one another. The father finally relents to his daughters pleas to be with her lover.  When the lover finds that he is the owner of an even greater fortune in a gold mine, the tables are turned on the grasping mother.  The essence of the story is a moral tale of cultural tension. High culture looses to low culture and boy gets girl, but poverty is overcome, redeeming the affair and moving the whole to the values of "High" culture. The short story was turned into a play with the help of well-known playwright William Gillette who was a resident for a time in Tryon, N.C.. The play reviewed as a "comedy," was well received in the Madison Square Garden theater in New York and played several more times in theaters in Plainfield, New Jersey and again in New York twelve years later. When the story appeared in a  leading journal the reputation of Burnett soared and she was broadly imitated other authors who wrote in and about Appalachia. She soon followed this short story with several others set in Appalachia. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. "Esmeralda," Scribner's  Monthly 14: 80-91 (May 1877).