Award-winning author Brad Watson is a native of Mississippi who now teaches at the University of Wyoming. In his new novel “Miss Jane,” drawing on the story of his own great-aunt, Watson explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early 20th-century Mississippi with a genital birth defect that would stand in the way of the central “uses” for a woman in that time and place—namely, sex and marriage.
From the highly erotic world of nature around her to the hard tactile labor of farm life, from the country doctor who befriends Jane to the boy who loved but was forced to leave her, the world of Miss Jane Chisolm is anything but barren. Free to satisfy only herself, she mesmerizes those around her, exerting an unearthly fascination that lives beyond her still.
Brad Watson is the author of two collections of stories and the novel The Heaven of Mercury, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award. His fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Ecotone, Electric Literature, and the Idaho Review, among other publications. He teaches at the University of Wyoming, Laramie.