60 pages • 2 hours read
Catherine MarshallChristy
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Catherine Marshall
Catherine Marshall was born into a pastor’s family in Tennessee and spent most of her youth in the Appalachian region, either in her birth state or West Virginia, where her family moved when she was nine. Her mother, Leonora, volunteered in a mission school before marrying her father, and the outline of Leonora’s story served as the inspiration for Christy. Marshall was thus deeply tied to the culture and religious life of Appalachia and well-positioned to write a book set in that context.
Marshall was already a well-known American writer by the time she released Christy, thanks to the success of the biography she wrote about her husband, Peter Marshall. A Man Called Peter was released in 1951, shortly after her husband’s death. Peter was a prominent pastor in Washington, D.C. and the chaplain of the US Senate, but he suffered numerous health crises during their married life, including a years-long bout of tuberculosis and later a fatal heart attack. Peter died when Catherine was still in her mid-thirties, leaving her as the sole caretaker for their son. The themes of disease, suffering, and loss which interweave the narrative of Christy mirror the patterns of Marshall’s own life.
A Man Called Peter sold well and launched Marshall into a career as an author; it was later released as a popular film in 1955. Coming from a ministerial family, her writing and publishing career centered on Christian books just at a time when the Christian market was staking out a large claim in the field of American publishing, driven both by popular novels like Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe (1942) and a new burst in missionary literature led by Elisabeth Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor (1957). In addition to her writing, Catherine Marshall helped found a Christian publishing company, Chosen Books.
Historical Context: Settlements in the Great Smoky Mountains Region
Christy is set in the fictional town of Cutter Gap, in a local area of the Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee known as the Cove. While the setting is fictionalized, it is inspired by real locations in the Appalachian region of the Tennessee/North Carolina borderlands. The novel touches on a few major characteristics of local culture, including the patterns of immigration in its settlement and its gradual integration into the wider world of post-Civil War America. It focuses on a period of history in the early 20th century during which the settlements in the Great Smoky Mountains region had been largely undisturbed by outside forces but were now facing regular interactions with outsiders.
Scottish immigrants almost exclusively carried out the European settlement of this area, forced from their homeland due to rising tensions with the British crown and then finding themselves unwelcome in the coastal lowlands of the United States. They re-established a traditional Scottish society in their new highlands, the Appalachians, thus creating a pattern that would be played out by Scottish and Irish immigrants throughout the East Coast. Cut off from broader society in their new location, however, they lived in impoverished conditions in their modest mountain homes.
At the time that Christy takes place, the outside world is contacting this isolated group on a large scale for the first time, through multiple avenues like the establishment of the mission, a new telephone line, and the activities of illegal rum-runners seeking to forge new supply lines of moonshine whisky. As their contacts with outsiders grow, the potential for change in the isolated mountain communities also grows in several sectors, including technology, industry, education, and health services. These changes, however, bear with them the potential for social friction as the long-established patterns of their local culture are met with differing expectations from the outside world.
