There are many compensations, however—the lush, lyrical writing about a remembered countryside; the reacquaintance Powell provides us with our own youthful secrets and yearnings; the rare sense of a creative artist working in dangerous proximity to her raw material, to those very crises that helped determine the course of her life and artistry. The understated but excruciating way in which Powell described the death of Daisy Willard was admired by no less a critic than Van Wyck Brooks, while the portrayal of Sabra Powell/Idah Hawkins can only be called a magnificent act of vengeance. (Sabra was still alive when My Home Is Far Away was published; her reaction to the book, if any, is not recorded.)

Powell apparently found this mixture of fiction and autobiography difficult to sustain and she was never entirely sure exactly what she had wrought. “Although I set out to do a complete job on my family, I colored it and, even worse, diluted it through a fear of embarrassing my fonder relatives,” she wrote in her diary during a moment of frustration. Immediately after publication, she reread the book: “My first feeling was one of queasiness over the initial establishment of a distinctly autobiographical flavor, but after a while the characters become wholly fictional, increasingly round and with the full reality that only created characters have. Certainly few facts are here.” And yet only four days later she was horrified when an unfriendly reviewer objected to her “pathetic, good-for-nothing people”: “I hate to bring myself out so openly for censure, also to expose the family. It made me cringe.”

Matters were not helped by the inane publicity campaign Scribner’s mounted for My Home Is Far Away, which stressed a wholesome, homespun quality in the book which, while undoubtedly present, is far from the whole truth. The text for one ad is almost farcical in its misperception:

The scene is Ohio in the early 1900s; the main characters are the members of the happy-go-lucky Willard family—always on the move, always seeking the home that is always far away. You’ll laugh with the Willards and sympathize with them in their moments of tragedy. They’re a family you’ll like—especially Marcia, the “middle one.” Meet them today. You’ll be glad you did.[[end extract]]

Happy-go-lucky? A dying mother, a delinquent father, neglected children, a stepmother with a silver whip—can this publicist have read the book? Cornball hype aside, My Home Is Far Away initially sold about four thousand copies—fairly well, by Powell’s sorry standards—and it was respectfully, if sparsely reviewed; in 1953, it was published in Great Britain by W.H. Allen. Powell planned a sequel—to be entitled simply, “Marcia”—and worked on it intermittently for the rest of her life, finishing at least eighty double-spaced typewritten pages. What remains of “Marcia” carried the central figure on to a new life in Cleveland, and brought back the lecturer Thorburne Putney and Aunt Lois for further complications.

It is probably best that Powell let My Home Is Far Away stand on its own. And so Marcia Willard is forever young, alert, battered but unbowed, ready to begin her real life, at long last riding that train that will take her far away from home and to a home that is far away: