about the range of truth I think I see" (109).

What Phyllis demands and Virginia in her long career enjoyed is a writer's freedom, a freedom that brings responsibility. It took Virginia six years, years of writing, rewriting, and research, including field trips to Denmark, to finish Kingdom Come, with much worrying meanwhile how to shape it and how to achieve what Stegner called that "middle ground" between history and imagination. A writer's work, his or her "enterprise as writer," to echo Nadine Gordimer echoing Roland Barthes, is his or her "essential gesture as a social being" (286). No Mormon writer, to be sure, no matter how stifling the air he or she may breathe, suffers Gordimer's South African repressions. But in both situations, the Mormon and the Southinto dangerous terrain. And as a constant, the high benchmark of the 1940s, the work of those writers Edward Geary calls "Mormondom's lost generation" (89). Whether we consider them the last of the provincials or our first moderns, they are literary ancestors worth rediscovering. How many come to mind? I didn't think they were quite as forgotten as Geary maintains until I asked Judith Freeman recently whether she had ever read Virginia Sorensen. "Who?" she wanted to know. So much for the Jessamyn West of Mormon writers whose fictional worlds of Cache and Sanpete valleys are as fully realized as Friendly Persuasion and who pointed the way to the "moral realism" (Bruce Jorgensen's term) now a commonplace among her literary heirs.

I see two, possibly three, palpable developments in