Book Review: The Tall Woman

Title: The Tall Woman 

Author: Wilma Dykeman

Date: 1962

Publisher: Wakestone (and others)

ISBN: 0-9613859-1-X

Length: 315 pages

Quote: "Lydia said softly, 'I never asked for easy, Mama.'"

Trigger warning: This classic of American Women's Literature is not a comedy, in form, but a biography. When a novel has the form of a biography the character may succeed, and her or his successes may be both satisfactory and laughable, but the happy ending is often "Then the character died old, regretted by all, and his or her heir was..." The time frame of the story simply exceeds that of the main character. The time frame of The Tall Woman exceeds that of its protagonist, Lydia McQueen.

In 1962 books that emphasized women's height often addressed baby-boomers who had been so unladylike as to grow taller than their fathers were, and after assuring those girls that there were enough overgrown young men out there to go around, they spent most of the space available talking about how to look shorter (stripes, shirts and skirts in different colors, skirts that reached exactly to the knee). The Tall Woman broke that rule; though Lydia is apparently the tall skinny type, according to the jacket drawing, the story is not about how she copes with her body shape but about how she copes with crises, brings up children, appreciates the differences among most of her neighbors and eventually beats the one really unlikable neighbor she has in a political dispute. It's a feel-good story.

One of the things I've regretted in life was that, though Wilma Dykeman Stokely was still teaching at Berea when I was there, I didn't demand to be admitted to her class. However, apart from the history in this novel about the late nineteenth century, there's not all that much to discuss about The Tall Woman; the story is easy to follow. It reads like a family legend and, going by its dedication, probably is one. Lydia is as lovable as Elvira Ware in Jubilee, as admirable as Mary Peters. 

Despite its appearance on some school reading lists, this is a novel that can be read for pleasure. It's almost sex-free (we read about the children, not about their begetting) and less violent than many novels about this period (Lydia does kill a bear). It won't embarrass adults if the children read it, at all. It will repay attentive reading; Lydia's relationships with each of her neighbors have their own nuances, and the pleasure of the irony rests on your willingness to remember those nuances.