Books published by publisher London Macmillan 1978:

The reader is requested to bear in mind that this volume lays no claim to scholarship, independent research, or originality of view. Its aim has been to select and collate, from sources not always easily accessible to the general reader, certain facts and conclusions bearing upon a subject of acknowledged interest. In so dealing with one of the many modes of primitive religion, it is perhaps inevitable that the writer should seem to exaggerate its importance, and in isolating a given series of data to undervalue the significance of the parallel facts from which they are severed. It is undeniable that the worship of the spirit-inhabited tree has usually, if not always, been linked with, and in many cases overshadowed by other cults; that sun, moon, and stars, sacred springs and stones, holy mountains, and animals of the most diverse kind, have all been approached with singular impartiality by primitive man, as enshrining or symbolising a divine principle. But no other form of pagan ritual has been so widely distributed, has left behind it such persistent traces, or appeals so closely to modern sympathies as the worship of the tree; of none is the study better calculated to throw light on the dark ways of primitive thought, or to arouse general interest in a branch of research which is as vigorous and fruitful as it is new. For these reasons, in spite of obvious disadvantages, its separate treatment has seemed to the writer to be completely justifiable.

Fair and Tender Ladies is a novel by Lee Smith published in 1988. It won the W.D. Weatherford Award that year.[1] Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel consisting entirely of letters written by its protagonist, Ivy Rowe, to numerous recipients from her childhood until her old age. It is set mostly in the Blue Ridge Mountains and covers events from shortly before World War I until the Vietnam era. The novel garnered much critical acclaim and has been adapted for the stage, including a musical version for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. (Wikipedia)