The Coat I Wore

Lucile Robinson Finlay was my grandmother. She was a brilliant woman who was ahead of her time. She became the first woman attorney in Mississippi admitted to the Bar Association in the 1920s. She possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of American and European history, especially Mississippi history. The main character, Anthony Hastings, was based upon our ancestor, Anthony Hutchins, a British officer who traveled down the Natchez Trace to settle his land in the Mississippi Delta. She influenced several notable authors from her hometown of Greenville, Mississippi to include Shelby Foote and Walker Percy among others. In The Coat I Wore, she described the characters in such a way that the reader can truly envision what they looked like and what they sounded like. She wrote a second novel which was finished, but not published. I have read it's equally as interesting as this one.