"One of the many delights of The Scarlet Thread is the intense, vivid sense of place and history unfolding. Doris Betts is not only a master of narrative art and insight into character, she is also a master of the history and life of a region, in this case the red clay Piedmont and Catawba River Valley of North Carolina in the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries. I know of no work of either fiction or nonfiction that portrays that part of the South in the aftermath of the Civil War with more realism, honesty, complexity, compelling narrative, and sensitivity."

          —from the Introduction by Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Brave Enemies