When the Civil War began in 1861 Lucy Rebecca Buck was the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prosperous planter, living on her family's plantation in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. On Christmas Day of that year she began a diary which she would keep for the duration of the war, during which time troops were quartered in her home and battles were literally waged in her front yard.

This extraordinary chronicle mirrors the experience of many women torn between loyalty to the Confederate cause and dissatisfaction with the unrealistic ideology of white southern womanhood. In powerful,...