Lyddy: A Tale of the Old South is a fictional reconstruction of antebellum life in the historic Midway community of Liberty County, Georgia, home of some of the Old South's wealthiest planters. Originally published in 1898, this blend of fiction and memoir looks through the eyes of a white plantation mistress at her family plantation, her marriage, slave life, and the destruction of the plantation economy that took place when Sherman's army arrived in December 1864. Writing in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Eugenia J. Bacon sought to represent plantation life as she had experienced it. Bacon's story provides a window on slave marriages, the retention of African folklore among coastal Georgia slaves, and the change in relations between masters and slaves after the Civil War. Lucinda H. MacKethan's extensive introduction explores the interwoven contexts of race, class, and gender that make this novel an interesting lens through which to view the complex human relationships that constituted plantation society in the Old South.

Recollections of a Southern Daughter recalls life in antebellum Liberty County, Georgia, a time and place best known today through the letters of the Charles Colcock Jones family, published in the classic Children of Pride, and the letters and journals of the Roswell King, Fanny Kemble, and Joseph LeConte families. In this memoir Cornelia Jones Pond gives an eyewitness account of a how the privileged life of the southern slaveholding class was destroyed by a whirlwind of change.

Pond's narrative begins in 1834, when she was born to one of the Old South's wealthiest plantation families. It ends in 1875, when she was a forty-one-year-old minister's wife and the mother of four daughters, trying to make her way in the drastically changed post-Civil War South. She began dictating her memoir to her daughter Anne in 1899, when she was sixty-five years old, and the handwritten manuscript eventually found its way to the Midway Church Museum. This is the first unabridged edition of Pond's memoir, and it includes notes, genealogy, and an extensive introduction by Lucinda H. MacKethan.

In Recollections of a Southern Daughter Pond renders with striking immediacy and affectionate detail not only her personal past but also the tremendous upheavals of history that she witnessed firsthand. Many of the experiences recorded here parallel those depicted in Children of Pride, thus extending our knowledge of the people of this region, their values, their everyday concerns, and the national drama that engulfed their families in the years of civil war.

Drawing upon letters, autobiographies and novels, this book examines the strategies that various southern women writers in the USA have used to create their own ""voice"", their own unique expression of mind and selfhood. This book demonstrates that, despite the constraining and muting effects of the South's historically patriarchal society, the region has been graced by the remarkably strong presence of women storytellers, both black and white, who have asserted their determination to become themselves through creative acts of voicing. Within a chronological structure, the author examines the letters of the plantation mistress Catherine Hammond, the memoir of ""Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"" by Harriet Jacobs, the autobiographical writings of Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neasle Hurston and Eudora Weity as well as their novels ""Barren Ground"", ""Their Eyes Were Watching God"" and ""The Optimist's Daughter"" and Alice Walker's ""The Color Purple"" and Lee Smith's ""Fair and Tender Ladies"".