The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg

by Louis Bromfield

1928. Louis Bromfield attained worldwide acclaim in the 1920s as the author of Early Autumn, his third novel and winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. At age 29, Bromfield was regarded as one of America's most promising young novelists, compared to the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. His novels were among the first adapted for feature-length sound films. From The Strange Case of Miss Annie He did not tell Mrs. Winnery that in attempting to solve one mystery, he had simply found himself face to face with another and more terrifying one which neither saints nor prophets nor scientists had ever solved in all the centuries of the world's recorded existence. It made Mr. Winnery seem to himself small and impertinent, and being a vain man, he did not care to have his wife share this discovery.

Genres: Fiction, American, 20th Century

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Louis Bromfield was an American author and conservationist who gained international recognition winning the Pulitzer Prize and pioneering innovative scientific farming concepts.

Bromfield studied agriculture at Cornell University from 1914 to 1916,[1] but transferred to Columbia University to study journalism. While at Columbia University, Louis Bromfield was initiated into the fraternal organization Phi Delta Theta. His time at Columbia would be short lived and he left after less than a year to go to war. After serving with the American Field Service in World War I and being awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor, he returned to New York City and found work as a reporter. In 1924, his first novel, The Green Bay Tree, won instant acclaim. He won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for best novel for Early Autumn. All of his 30 books were best-sellers, and many, such as The Rains Came and Mrs. Parkington, were made into successful motion pictures.

photograph by: Carl Van Vechten

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this novel based on the recommendation of a friend. It’s my first Bromfield book.

I’m not likely to read any more of his work anytime soon. It’s not that I didn’t like the book, because I did. My reading list is simply too long for another title, so I’m adding Bromfield’s Early Autumn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, to my waiting list. Maybe I’ll get to it this winter when Florence gets wet and cold and turns far too inhospitable for Texan ex-pats like me to venture outside.

The book is about a lonely spinster (the daughter of a charismatic, profligate American preacher), who dies in a rented room in the ancestral home of a charming priest in Brinoe, Italy. On her deathbed, she asks the priest and the nun attending her to open a window so that her pet birds can fly free. When she dies soon after, the priest and the nun begin to prepare the body for burial, removing white gloves and a heavy black veil she has never been seen without. At first, the two are startled by her beauty and her youthful appearance, and then—as they continue to expose the body—they experience life-changing epiphanies at the sight of stigmata on her feet and hands and an imprint of a crown of thorns on her forehead and in her scalp.

Obviously, the book can be examined in terms of themes and motifs that revolve around freedom, spirituality, alienation, home, love, nature, and decay. Characterization also provides grist for interpretation. Of the dozen or so characters, all are connected in some way to the life and death of Miss Annnie Spragg, much in the same way the characters in The Bridge of San Luis Rey are connected, peripherally, yet profoundly. And Bromfield’s style invites comment, too. We never hear from Miss Annie Spragg directly—all commentary is delivered through other characters and occasionally through the omniscient voice of the narrator.

But what interests me most is the way Bromfield explores an idea I first stumbled on when I began reading Flannery O’Connor, the idea that sophistication can distance a person from meaningful spiritual experience. That is, giving ourselves up to mystery and miracles can seem lowly and homespun, but it can enrich us in ways that more cerebral experiences can’t.

Thus, characters who can be described as “simple,” including the priest and nun in attendance at Miss Annie Spragg’s death, can experience and accept willingly the miracle they witness and go away renewed and fulfilled by the experience. Other, more cultured, characters, such as Father d’Astier, who struggles with his faith as well as his past, refuse to believe the miracle and remain spiritually and emotionally unchanged.

Mrs. Weatherby is the kind of sophisticated character that O’Connor would have loved: She is cruel and self-absorbed to the point of being a caricature. Her disdain for a pagan statue, a fertility god, found buried in her yard shows how dangerous it can be to reject a simple, primitive approach to the spiritual world. She demands the statue be reburied, despite objections from local farmhands who warn her she’s tempting fate. They’re right, of course.

Miss Fosdick, Mrs. Wetherby’s niece and live-in maid), reacts viscerally to the statue, recognizing its power in some way she can’t explain. Apparently greatly changed by her recognition, she musters the courage to reject her unhappy life with her aunt, and her life blossoms. She finds herself in a state of grace.

It’s a good read, not the quality of similar pieces such as Forster’s A Passage to India, which also deals with the importance-of-accepting-mystery motif, and certainly not the quality of anything O’Connor has done.

[Gisselle Moyano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro completamente recomendable. Superó todas mis expectativas; se aleja por completo de lo típico. El autor desarrolla con gran detalle una gran cantidad de historias que están entretejidas al misterio principal de la obra, y todo esto se hace sin dejar de lado la historia principal. Las historias de los personajes son contadas con una riqueza extraordinaria; dándole al lector una experiencia placentera. Además de la compleja construcción de la narrativa, algo que también llama la atención es la profundidad del mensaje entregado. Normalmente las historias de misterio se hayan repletas de términos formales, de racionalidad e inflexibilidad. Sin embargo, el misterio presentado en este libro es, finalmente, algo que se deja abierto, sin resolver por completo; y esto se hace de un modo tan sutil que no genera ningún caos en la mente del lector. Esto fue completamente novedoso para mí, que he leído muchas novelas de misterio que en la mayoría de los casos terminaban con una verdad absoluta y un deseo de saber más. En este caso, se deja claro que hay misterios que escapan la racionalidad a la que los seres humanos nos aferramos tan fieramente. Tanto el mensaje como la narrativa hacen del libro una experiencia enriquecedora, y, sin duda alguna, buscaré en el futuro más obras de este autor, ya que al parecer éste no se apegaba a lo convencional, y tiene un gran poder de crear mundos complejos repletos de sentido.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are more mysteries than the one about Miss Annie Spragg, strange as hers seems to be. Can Mr. Winnery unravel them all? Perhaps it may be true that "...any belief which brought comfort to the human race had its own place in the divine scheme of things".

[Frank Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dickens-like, captivating, weaves together many lives, interesting in terms of diagnosis/disability, actually written in complete sentences...

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is an odd duck, but it was a worthwhile read. The novel opens with Miss Annie Spragg’s death in Italy, after which many claim to have seen her display signs of the stigmata. The novel follows her story back to her birth to a John Smith-style religious prophet on the American frontier. She, at some point, breaks off from the Prophet’s movement alon with her eccentric, fundamentalist brother. Miss Spragg makes virtually everyone she encounters uneasy, at the same time being a hermit and a subject of sexual desire to nearly everyone who encounters her, before eventually ending up a religious hermit in Italy.

The novel doesn’t just follow Annie, though. It also contains a sort of kaleidoscope of characters whose lives have, sometimes in small ways, touched Miss Annie Spragg. These include an American medium, who preys upon rich tourists in Europe, and her homely niece. An older bachelor who realizes that he’s wasted his life and seeks to save the rest of the time he has. A young prostitute who is transformed by an unlikely romance. A nun whose life is changed at Annie Spragg’s death. And really even several others.

The book is pretty modernist in some ways–obvious ones such as the multi-vocality and the attempt (think The Waste Land or Harte Crane’s The Bridge) to identify a meaning-making myth within the West’s primitive traditions (here, definitely tied up with Pan and pagan fertility goddesses). The book seems intent on searching out a sort of mystic tie to all of these people and events.

The only problem is that the characters are sometimes pretty stereotypical, and the storytelling is often pretty predictable (despite its strangeness). The characters are not quite convincing, and the writing is not distinct enough that it creates its own convincing world. So, all in all, it was an interesting, entertaining, but not overly memorable novel.

[Alexander Vreede · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading most of the book mainly because of Mr Bromfield’s writing style. But as the story progressed the book became too wide and needlessly complicated. As a consequence I’m still wondering what the book really was about, what really was the case of Miss Annie Spragg.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, quasi-mystical book. Some rather obvious, though not unpleasant, filler (i.e. the entire Aunt Bessie chapter), but overall a pleasant read.