Charles Greenleaf Bell’s The Married Land, is a work of high-seriousness, lusty humor, and a passion for life. It tells the story of Daniel Byrne’s return home to Greenville, Mississippi where he finds a welter of confusion. As he struggles to restore it to some order, he faces the question of how the contradictions he finds – family unravellings, polarities of North and South, black and white, rich and poor – could have formed a time-defying union, a center in which opposites blend together in an anatomy of love.