A nude singularity

Lily Peter's life was extraordinary - what astronomers call a nude singularity, an unexplainable phenomenon. Miss Lily was known to many different groups of Arkansans as a self-made millionaire farmer, a gifted poet, a photographer, a musician, a conservationist, an environmentalist, a patron of the arts, and a spinster who never forgot that she had been loved. But what is extraordinary about Lily Peter is that she became all of these things when all odds were against her becoming any one of them.

AnnieLaura Jagger's biography of Lily Peter carefully documents the pluck and perseverance of this poverty-stricken farm girl from eastern Arkansas whose love of language and music and delta dirt drove her to learn, to write, to manage a four-thousand acre plantation, and to mortgage part of that farm to hire Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Symphony to play, among other things, an original composition she commissioned for the Arkansas sesquicentennial celebration.

Because of her personal relationship with Miss Lily and her academic background, Jaggers' biography is both anecdotal and scholarly, both appreciative of this extraordinary personality and clear-headed. The result is a provocative portrait of a woman who altered her own evolution to become fully human in the best sense. But she was human, and Jaggers never loses sight of that fact.