The Forgotten Southern Writer

Tula Pendleton grew up in Hartford in the late 1800s before marrying Holmes Cummins Jr. in 1894 and moving to Virginia. She had a blossoming career as a writer of short stories in American magazines in the early 20th century, but sadly as her career was taking off, her husband became more and more ill. The couple struggled with family, health and financial troubles which led them to carry out a suicide pact in 1924. This event was covered by more than 120 newspapers throughout the country.

That’s about all Barbara Pendleton Jones knew of her Great Aunt Tula.

“I just knew the bare bones of the story so that was one of the things that made me want to flesh out the story,” Jones said.

She wanted to fill in the blanks, so to speak.

In 2017, as she was moving toward retirement after a 50-year career as a clinical psychologist, Jones got curious and wanted to find out more about this great aunt.

“I didn’t necessarily have in mind to write a book. The project really started out mostly as a fun research project to find out more about this mysterious figure that my dad had told me about growing up,” Jones said.

Starting out, she had very little to go on – just a couple of letters and bits and pieces of a family history Pendleton had written later in life. It was at the Library of Congress that Jones was able to find all but one of her published short stories. That allowed her to put some of the framework together involving the events of Pendleton’s life.

Jones came to Kentucky to visit some of the places that Pendleton had lived and written about. She later discovered some letters in two different archives written by her great aunt that provided her the best picture of her psychology and what she was really like, Jones said.

After eight years of research and a couple of years of writing, Jones published a biography about her great aunt titled “Tula Pendleton: The Life and Work of a Forgotten Southern Writer.”

Jones hopes that people see that Pendleton was a “very talented woman from Hartford, Kentucky who fell into complete oblivion after

her death.

Writing the book was a fun and fascinating exercise for Jones and she wanted to publish the book because she believes Pendleton deserves the recognition.

“It is the story of someone with great promise and a budding career who came to grief because of her husband’s severe illness,” she said. “I think that she deserves some recognition as a Southern woman writer in the early 20th century. The number of those women is not enormous and she deserves her place in that group of writers.”

Jones believes the book will be of special interest to those who live in Ohio County because Pendleton has deep roots in Western Kentucky. Her father was one of Hartford’s most prominent citizens back in his day. Dr. John Edward Pendleton was a Confederate officer and he was one of the most renowned physicians in Western Kentucky at the time. He came back to Hartford after the Civil War to establish his practice. Jones included as much as she could about Pendleton’s life in Hartford and what it was like for her to live in a small town at the time.

“I think anybody who grew up in Hartford and has deep roots in Hartford will recognize the kind of environment (Pendleton wrote about) with all its joys and shortcomings that she was familiar with growing up in a tiny town,” Jones said.

Jones also included a whole chapter in the book about what Kentucky was like in the years following the Civil War.

Besides the short stories she wrote about the pleasures, comforts and stings of small-town life, Pendleton also wrote several types of stories ranging from romances and medical dramas to haunting tales of the uncanny. She was a huge admirer of Edgar Allan Poe. Pendleton also wrote a screenplay which was made into a silent film – no small accomplishment at the time, especially for a woman. At the time of her death, Jones said Pendleton had a draft of a novel completed and had been working on a biography of Poe. All of Pendleton’s published written works are included in the book.

Because of the stigma of suicide at the time, Jones feels Pendleton and her husband “sort of fell into oblivion after their deaths.” She didn’t even know where they were buried when she started doing research. She learned that they were cremated and brought back to Hartford to be buried at the foot of her father’s grave. Jones plans to have markers made to place at their graves sometime next spring marking the 100th anniversary of their deaths.