Emma Bell Miles

Emma Bell Miles (October 19, 1879 – March 19, 1919) was a writer, poet, and artist whose works capture the essence of the natural world and the culture of Southern Appalachia.

Miles was born Emma Bell in Evansville, Indiana on October 19, 1879. Her parents, Benjamin Franklin and Martha Ann Mirick Bell, were both schoolteachers. Emma's early childhood was spent in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, a small town on the Ohio River near Cincinnati. When she was nine, her family moved to the area that is now Red Bank, Tennessee and then to Walden's Ridge (now Signal Mountain), Tennessee.

A talented young woman, she left home to study art in St. Louis, Missouri. Homesickness forced her to return to Walden's Ridge after only two years. There she fell in love with George Franklin Miles, (known as Frank) and, only three weeks after her mother's death, married him in spite of her family's opposition.

Emma and Frank had five children, twin daughters Jean and Judith in 1902, Joe in 1905, Katharine “Kitty” in 1907, and Frank Mirick “Mark” in 1909. Emma was devastated in 1913 when the Frank Mirick died from scarlet fever.

Emma and Frank struggled to make ends meet and often their major source of income was from Emma's short stories and poems. She also made money selling her art, often in the form of small items such as greeting cards. In 1904 Emma sold her first poem to Harper's Monthly. An eleven-verse poem titled “The Difference,” appeared in the March issue. She followed that up the next month with another poem, “Homesick,” written when she was living in St. Louis. Emma's major success was The Spirit of the Mountains published in 1905. This genre-defying book has elements of local color, short story, travel narrative, personal memoir, and cultural analysis. The music chapter in Spirit of the Mountains was first published in 1904 as an article titled “Some Real American Music” in Harper's Monthly. It was probably the first appreciation of Appalachian music to appear in a popular magazine, and it was certainly one of the first to appear anywhere at all, following by only four years the early academic writing on the subject by William Wells Newell in the Journal of American Folklore. She also wrote articles for local newspapers, the most popular of which were entitled The Fountain Square Conversations, a fanciful series in which birds gather at a fireman's memorial fountain in downtown Chattanooga and have philosophical conversations on life. Emma's book, Our Southern Birds, was published in 1922. Her journals also contain several references to manuscripts of other works, including The Good Gray Mother and Our Southern Flowers, that were never published and have not been located. Emma's poetry, journals, and short stories were later published in Strains from a Dulcimore (1930), Once I Too Had Wings: The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908-1918 (2014), and The Common Lot and Other Stories: The Published Short Fiction, 1908-1921 (2016).

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