Aunt Jane of Kentucky

Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1908. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 8x5x1. Strong, Beulah. No jacket. Tissue guard starting but still holding, minor general wear. 1908 Hard Cover. 283 pp. Four pages of publisher ads follow text. Grey cloth boards with illustration of elderly woman sitting in a rocking chair while doing needlework on front board. Frontispiece and page decorations by Beulah Strong. AUNT JANE OF KENTUCKY is a collection of nine short stories written by American author Eliza "Lida" Calvert Obenchain. Obenchain wrote the book under the pen name Eliza Calvert Hall, a pseudonym that she frequently used when writing her fictional works. Set in rural western Kentucky in the late nineteenth century, the book recounts elderly quilt-maker Aunt Jane's memories of life in the rural south as told to an unnamed younger woman visitor. The collection under the title Aunt Jane of Kentucky was first published together in 1907. The book appeared in at least thirty-three editions and reached approximately one million readers. The most famous reader was perhaps United States President Theodore Roosevelt who suggested reading the book to listeners during a 1908 speech: "I cordially recommend the first chapter of Aunt Jane of Kentucky as a tract in all families where the menfolk tend to selfish or thoughtless or overbearing disregard to the rights of their womenfolk." Beulah Strong, an artist trained in Paris and teaching at Potter College in Bowling Green, Kentucky, used the description of Aunt Jane at the beginning of the story, "Sally Ann's Experience," as her model for the book's frontispiece. Strong created fourteen more pen and ink illustrations to open nine of the stories and to serve as tail-pieces at the end of five stories.