VIVID, MOVING, SYMPATHETIC, HUMOROUS.
VIVID, MOVING, SYMPATHETIC, HUMOROUS.
VIVID, MOVING, SYMPATHETIC, HUMOROUS.
VIVID, MOVING, SYMPATHETIC, HUMOROUS.
A Diary from Dixie.
A Diary from Dixie.
A Diary from Dixie.
ByMary Boykin Chesnut. Being her Diary from November, 1861, to August, 1865. Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary. Illustrated. 8vo. Ornamental Cloth, $2.50 net; postage additional.
Mrs. Chesnut was the most brilliant woman that the South has ever produced, and the charm of her writing is such as to make all Southerners proud and all Northerners envious. She was the wife of James Chesnut, Jr., who was United States Senator from South Carolina from 1859 to 1861, and acted as an aid to President Jefferson Davis, and was subsequently a Brigadier-General in the Confederate Army. Thus it was that she was intimately acquainted with all the foremost men in the Southern cause.
“In this diary is preserved the most moving and vivid record of the Southern Confederacy of which we have any knowledge. It is a piece of social history of inestimable value. It interprets to posterity the spirit in which the Southerners entered upon and struggled through the war that ruined them. It paints poignantly but with simplicity the wreck of that old world which had so much about it that was beautiful and noble as well as evil. Students of American life have often smiled, and with reason, at the stilted and extravagant fashion in which the Southern woman had been described south of Mason and Dixon’s line—the unconscious self-revelations of Mary Chesnut explain, if they do not justify, such extravagance. For here, we cannot but believe, is a creature of a fine type, a ‘very woman,’ a very Beatrice, frank, impetuous, loving, full of sympathy, full of humor. Like her prototype, she had prejudices, and she knew little of the Northern people she criticised so severely; but there is less bitterness in these pages than we might have expected. Perhaps the editors have seen to that. However this may be they have done nothing to injure the writer’s own nervous, unconventional style—a style breathing character and temperament as the flower breathes fragrance.”—New York Tribune.
“It is written straight from the heart, and with a natural grace of style that no amount of polishing could have imparted.”—Chicago Record-Herald.
“The editors are to be congratulated; it is not every day that one comes on such material as this long-hidden diary.”—Louisville Evening Post.
“It is a book that would have delighted Charles Lamb.”—Houston Chronicle.