Six of One

Six of One is a 1978 novel by the American writer Rita Mae Brown, published by Harper & Row. It is the first book in the Runnymede series, which follows a fictional small town in Maryland straddling the Mason-Dixon line, and also the first volume of the Hunsenmeir trilogy, which centers on the elderly sisters of that surname. Brown has said that the sisters draw on her own mother and aunt, and that the town recalls her birthplace, a place with one foot in the North and one in the South.

The narrative moves back and forth in time. The first part is set in 1908, when the Hunsenmeir sisters were little girls already quarreling and making up constantly. The contemporary section, set in 1980, finds the two women in their seventies, with the same mix of affection and resentment. The first-person narrator is Nickel, a thirty-five-year-old bisexual writer who has returned to her hometown to work out what comes next in her life.

The book features a large, mostly female cast, each character with an exaggerated streak: an aristocratic lesbian heiress who kills the local weapons tycoon on principle, an illiterate and hardworking servant, or a sexually forthright southern belle who turns her home into a speakeasy during Prohibition. Events both minor and historic are handled with light humor, only occasionally giving way to a more serious tone.

Critics welcomed the novel for its joyful tone at a time when, as some reviewers noted, women's fiction often dwelt on suffering. Susanna Rodell, writing in Harvard's Crimson Review, found it fun, though its style was uneven on the surface. Cynthia McDonald, in The Washington Post Book World, praised it as joyous and passionate. Brown received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Arts Council to publish it.