An Evening When Alone will greatly enhance awareness of the
situation of single women in the nineteenth-century South. "It has
been natural that the study of antebellum Southern women has
concentrated upon the married", writes Michael O'Brien in his
substantive and moving introduction. "In this, Southern scholarship
has not distinguished itself from the main currents of women's
history. At the center of our understanding has grown to be the
plantation mistress. We have been offered varying versions of her -
as victim, as heroine, as exploiter, as quasi-abolitionist, as
proslavery ideologue - but her centrality has been assumed. Yet the
unmarried woman was not a rare phenomenon". Single women, with
widows and young unmarried women, made up almost half of the adult
female population. By looking at single women, An Evening When
Alone restores some balance and brings to light single women's
private journals, to which they habitually devoted much time and
care. This first volume to come from the Southern Texts Society
presents the journals of four very different women who, although
their lives were worlds apart, lived and wrote in the South during
the years 1827-67. The first is Elizabeth Ruffin of Evergreen
plantation in Virginia, whose two short journals convey a sharp,
ironic sensibility reminiscent of Jane Austen. Then there is a
governess (whose identity is a matter of interesting dispute) in
her early thirties, beginning an independent career and living in
some discomfort on a Mississippi plantation near Natchez between
1835 and 1837. The third, Janet Caroline North of South Carolina,
shows in her 1851-52 journals the high-society belle on alert and
gossipy patrol at the Virginia andNew York springs. Finally, there
is Ann Lewis Hardeman, growing old in the midst of an extended
family near Jackson, Mississippi, struggling to bring up her dead
sister's children and endure the Civil War and illness with bleak
fortitude and religious intensity. These journals will appeal to
anyone who takes pleasure in the diarists' human resonance, their
explication and observation of ordinary joys and travails;
courtship, disappointed love, illness, the gratifications and pain
of female friendship, the ambivalences of family life, the grief
caused by the Civil War, the troubles occasioned by men, and the
difficulty and consolation of religion.
General
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