Caroline Miller, 1903-1992

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Wright, Emily

Lonzo had brought her a century plant from the Coast, and Cean set it in a far corner of her yard and watered it. She wondered how anybody would ever know if it counted a hundred years right till it was time for it to bloom. She would not be here, nor Lonzo, nor the last youngest child that she might bear. . . . In a hundred years . . . she would be dead and rotten long ago. There would be nothing alive that she had known-not a child, nor a cow, nor a bird. . . . She and hers would be gone, like prince's feathers and old-maid flowers and bachelor-buttons that die with killing frost, leaving only dried seeds for a careful hand to garner if it will; blazing-star and mulberry geraniums will leave roots to sleep in the earth like a wild thing; Cean would leave no roots to wake again to the sun of another year. Her children, she judged, were her seeds and roots and new life. (238-39)

It is the intense display and interfusion of external and internal nature accomplished in such passages as these that, for many reviewers, lifted Miller's novel "out of competence into importance" (W.K.R. 10), making it "far more than regional in its conception and scope" (Bishop 15). Certainly this text's claim to our attention is artistic as well as historical; not only as a work of history but also as a work of art, Lamb in His Bosom deserves a place in the literary-historical record that has too long been denied it. It is long past time for Miller's legacy-in a sense her "seeds and roots and new life"-to "wake again to the sun of another year."

Miller Bibliography

Miller's papers are housed at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University. The Caroline Pafford Miller Collection includes newspaper clippings, letters, copies of her published short stories, and unpublished manuscripts. Her published works are:

"The Greatest of These." Waycross Journal-Herald 19 Feb. 1924: 2.

Lamb in His Bosom. Harper, 1933. Rpt. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1993.

"Indian Wooing. Pictorial Review (Jan. 1935): 12 .

"Loving Wife," Pictorial Review (Jan. 1937): 14 .

Lebanon. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1944.

"Cricket." Ladies Homes Journal (Apr. 1945): 25 .

NOTES

1 The play was "Red Calico, "written with King Bowden. It received first honorable mention in a Savannah, Georgia, prize contest for original one-act plays, as well as second place in the Little Theater Guild contest in New York ("Caroline Miller Submitted Brilliant Play in Contest," Savannah Morning News 30 Mar. 1928). The short story was "The Greatest of These"; it won first place in the Quarterly Sunday American Short Story Contest.

2 Lewis's remark appears as a blurb on the book jacket of an early edition of Lamb. Lewis probably penned this remark while serving as a judge for the 1933 Harper Prize, for which Lamb was nominated. See Bishop 16, 17.

WORKS CITED

Bishop, Joanne. "An Ethnographic Study of the 1934 Pulitzer Prize Novel Lamb in His Bosom." Caroline Pafford Miller Collection, 4728, box 5, folder 13. Special Collections. Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory U.