Sea Island Lady

Sea Island Lady by Griswold, Francis. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780685068335.

This is the story of a New England girl – Emily Fenwick – who went South at the end of the Civil War as the very young wife of a carpetbagger, not knowing what destiny was to hold her there for the endurance of a rich dramatic life. It is also the story of how she met a young Union Army officer, of her love for him, and of the incident which changes the whole course of her career; of how she makes her life in South Carolina and of South Carolina, of the Beaufort family she marries into, and of six tumultuous decades of war, reconstruction, revival, and finally the transition to modern times. The setting is for the most part the town of Beaufort and the sea islands nearby. Though primarily the story of a woman – one of the memorable figures to step from the pages of a novel in our time – it is also an enchanting picture of a land new to fiction: the sea-island world of the Carolina Low Country, of marsh sweep and dreaming tidewater, fields under burning sun, and woods fragrant and mysterious.