SUMMARY Frances Courtenay Baylor Barnum was an uthor of popular fiction who wrote novels and short stories as well as essays nd poems. Her literary style reflected the fashions of late nineteenth-century merica, with dramatic, instructive, sentimental plots and genteel characters. hough many of her works were set in Europe or Mexico, Barnum’s 1887 novel Behind the Blue Ridge diverged from this pattern, epicting farmers and homesteaders of western Virginia. (Barnum was a longtime esident of Lexington and Winchester.) Reviews of the work praised her lively characterizations and her bility to convincingly capture the social customs and speech patterns of Blue idge pioneers.