Two Novels: The Captain and the Colonel / Two Years or The Way We Lived Then (The Publications of the Southern Texts Society)
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About this book
As the well-educated and socially skilled wife of a prominent Confederate Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823-86) was ideally situatedand intellectually equippedto record the narrative of daily life in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Yet while she is widely recognized for the significant contribution of her "diaries " Mary Chesnuts other works chronicling her experiences in the Civil War South have remaineduntil nowunpublished and virtually unknown. Intensely autobiographical novels The Captain and the Colonel and Two Yearsor The Way We Lived Then are Chesnuts fictionalized accounts of the world as women experienced it in the mid-nineteenth-century South. These short unfinished novels address a wide range of subjects related to women and serve as an extension of the valuable source material found in the diaries revealing much about southern history and culture gender roles slave-mistress relations childhood education the experiences of westward migration and the impact of the Civil War on private lives and relationships. With an Introduction by Elizabeth Hanson that places Chesnuts novels in their social context and thoughtfully edited by Elisabeth Muhlenfeld Mary Chesnuts fiction is a fascinating and long overdue addition to the library of southern history.
