In the spring of 1839, Eliza Middleton (1815-1890), the youngest daughter of a wealthy South Carolina rice planter and diplomat, married Philadelphian Joshua Francis Fisher at Middleton Place, one of the most celebrated plantations in the South. Soon after the wedding Eliza began a new life in Philadelphia. In her first letter home, she begged her mother, "Tell me everything when you write". Thus began a seven-year conversation -- on paper -- between Eliza and her British-born mother, Mary Hering Middleton (1772-1850), that would encompass some 375 letters. The correspondence offers a...

Emily Wharton Sinkler was only eighteen years old when she began to write to distant relatives, chronicling her experiences on an antebellum cotton plantation. The daughter of prominent Philadelphia lawyer Thomas Wharton, Emily had married Charles Sinkler of South Carolina and moved south to begin a new life. Emily's letters ring with keen insights into Southern society and offer a definitive account of a young woman transplanted to the South in 1842 through the Civil War. This frequent and thorough correspondence conveys the rich and varied details of a time divided between North and...

Augusta Jane Evans Wilson (1835-1909) was one of nineteenth-century America's most popular novelists and outspoken supporters of the Confederacy. Her nine novels include the recently reissued Beulah, the stridently pro-Confederate Macaria, and the extremely successful St. Elmo, which rivaled Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur in sales. In addition to writing best-selling books, Wilson was a powerful letter-writer whose correspondents included prominent Confederate leaders. Wilson's epistles, 112 of which are gathered in this volume, reveal the depth of her ambitions for herself and the...

The northern education of two southern women in postbellum America; When sisters Mary and Louisa Poppenheim, daughters of a prominent Charleston, South Carolina, mercantile family, left their childhood home in the 1880s to attend Vassar College in New York, they entered a world that challenged their beliefs about women and society. First Mary and then Louisa pursued degrees at one of the most rigorous and progressive women's colleges in the country. In a stream of letters home, the sisters chronicled the opportunities and ideals they encountered. Their mother, alarmed by such influences,...

Balancing literary aspiration with gender limitations in the nineteenth-century South; Mary Bayard Clarke (1827-1886) grew up in a North Carolina planter family that revered southern traditions, but she was not a woman to be stymied by conventional expectations. A writer of ambition and ability, she published poetry and prose, traveled widely, corresponded with prominent men and women of her day, and repeatedly challenged stereotypes of nineteenth-century women. Her writings, letters, and family papers reveal a fiercely independent, creative, and adaptable individual - a woman who seemingly...

Caroline Petigru Carson (1820-1892), the elder daughter of Charleston intellectual James Louis Petigru and sister of the novelist Susan Petigru King, seemed destined from birth for life as a southern plantation mistress. Yet, like her sister, Carson challenged the conventions of nineteenth-century Charleston and defied traditional expectations by living apart from her husband and later as a very merry widow. Like her father unwilling to support secession, Carson, a staunch Unionist, left her native South Carolina at the onset of the Civil War. She settled first in New York and then, a decade...

This volume tells the stories of women born between 1890 and 1940 in eastern Tennessee and western South Carolina, who grew up on farms, in labour camps and in remote towns during an era when the region's agricultural system changed dramatically.

Echoes from a Distant Frontier is an edited, annotated selection of the correspondence of Corinna and Ellen Brown, two single women in their twenties, who left a comfortable New England home in 1835 for the Florida frontier. Moving with two aunts and a brother following the deaths of their parents, the Brown sisters settled near the village of Mandarin on the east bank of the St. Johns River, just south of present-day Jacksonville. These two articulate and literate women, both aspiring authors, wrote of their experiences and observations to family members - most important their brother...

Emmala Reed (1839-1893) may not have watched the unfolding of the Civil War from the front lines, but she nonetheless witnessed the collapse of the Confederacy. With the fall of Charleston and the burning of Columbia, waves of refugees flooded into her hometown of Anderson, South Carolina. Returning Confederate soldiers passed through this isolated settlement to get rations of cornmeal on their journey home, and eventually Union troops occupied the town. All the while this twenty-five-year-old, unmarried woman recorded what she observed from Echo Hall, her family home on Anderson's Main...

The international adventures of a Southern widow turned patron of historical discovery