Lida used her talent as a writer to draft original articles to advocate for women's rights. In 1898 Cosmopolitan published "Sally Ann's Experience." The story was reprinted in the Woman's Journal, the Ladies' Home Journal, and in international magazines and newspapers; making the story a familiar to people around the world. "Sally Ann's Experience" became the first chapter of
Aunt Jane of Kentucky, a collection of short stories published in 1907. She followed up with
The Land of Long Ago in 1909 and
Clover and Blue Grass in 1916. Lida published a short novel,
To Love and to Cherish, in 1911.
Aunt Jane
"Aunt Jane", an elderly spinster, was a reoccurring character in Lida Obenchain's short stories who told the experiences of the people in a rural southern town, named Goshen, to a younger woman visitor who relayed them to the reader. This type of rhetorical device, called a "double narrative", was a common form of storytelling in this era. A collection of short stories, Obenchain's first published book, featuring Aunt Jane was released in 1907 under the title
"Aunt Jane of Kentucky".
Rural southern dialect
In the era after the Civil War, magazines featured writers that told stories with regional dialects in local setting. Lida frequently utilized this style of storytelling in her writing. She was successful using this technique with
The New York Times saying in their review of
Aunt Jane of Kentucky that "Aunt Jane is not false, nor cheap, nor shallow, and the stories that are put in her mouth exhale the very breath of old gardens and county roads and fields."
Interests and themes
Women's relationships Melody Graulich in the Prologue to the 1990 reprint of
Aunt Jane of Kentucky notes that Lida Obenchain has women's relationships as a major theme of her writing. The significance of female relationship is further reflected in her choice of her grandmother's maiden name and her own maiden name as her pen name.
Women's concerns Through Aunt Jane and the other characters in her stories, Lida tells of the problems facing women of her time with imagery and symbolism taken from the domestic arts of sewing, cooking, and gardening.
Quilting Lida portrays the social fabric of her rural southern region by using quilting metaphors in her stories. At the end of
Aunt Jane's Album, the unnamed narrator concludes,
- "I looked again at the heap of quilts. An hour ago they had been patchwork, and nothing more. But now! The old woman's words had wrought a transformation in the homely mass of calico and silk and worsted. Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality."