Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers by Nancy C. Parrish (Review)

Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers by Nancy C. Parrish (Louisiana State University Press, 1998)

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Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers by Nancy C. Parrish (Review)

by Amy Thompson McCandless
Southern Cultures, Vol. 5, No. 4: Winter 1999

Louisiana State University Press, 1998

“It was like falling into a womb.”

In an interview with Nancy Parrish, this was how writer Lee Smith described her literary genesis, tracing it to Hollins College, a small, women’s liberal arts school near Roanoke, Virginia. Parrish uses this maternal metaphor to examine the formative influences of the Hollins environment on the work of the “Hollins Group”: writers Lee Smith, Annie Doak Dillard, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, Jo Berson Buckley, Anne Bradford Warner, and Nancy Beckham Ferris, well-known contemporary authors and scholars, each an alumna of the Hollins class of 1967.

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