The Last Girls (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Lee Smith
- First Published: 2002
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The early 1960’s to 1999
- Setting: Mary Scott College, Virginia, and the , a Mississippi River luxury steamboat
- Principal Characters: Margaret Ballou, Harriet Holding, Catherine Wilson, Courtney Ralston, Anna Todd
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Virginia, 1960’s, United States or Americans, South or Southerners, Twentieth century, Marriage, Friendship, Mississippi River, Storytelling, Women, Accidents, Death or dying, Rivers or waterways, Funeral rites or ceremonies, Rites or ceremonies, 1990’s, Career women
- Locales: Virginia, Mississippi River
Lee Smith’s tenth novel focuses on five women who were once undergraduate roommates at a Southern women’s college. In 1965, inspired by a handsome young instructor’s dramatic reading of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the five young women joined with six others and sailed down the Mississippi River on a raft, earning some notoriety as local newspapers photographed the spunky college girls and less adventurous, land-bound housewives offered them picnic lunches along the river.
Thirty-five years later, Harriet Holding, Catherine Wilson, Courtney...
[The entire page is 1825 words long]
