A Rebel Wife in Texas offers a singular glimpse into nineteenth-century southern culture through the eyes of a captivating and complex woman who, as a product of that culture, both revered and reviled it.

Elizabeth Scott Neblett was raised in a slaveholding family in eastern Texas. Despite the frontier conditions, she was very much a southern belle who embraced conventional dictates and aspired to the "cult of true womanhood". Neblett entered romantic marriage and motherhood with optimism, but over time her experiences as a wife and mother made her severe and increasingly despondent. When...