The publications of the Southern Texts Society

"These previously unpublished private writings expand our understanding of Grace King (1852-1932) both as a writer and as a nineteenth-century, middle-class, white southern woman. A prolific New Orleans author whose work transcended the local-color genre popular in her day, King has long been admired for her versatility in many written forms, for her depictions of both black and white women in a variety of settings and situations, and for her insights into the intricate social structure of her native city." "Over a span of forty-six years, King produced four histories, three novels and two novellas, three collections of stories, two biographies, an autobiography, a play, and numerous articles and sketches. At age thirty-four she began a journal "to find my own peace in my own life." As Melissa Walker Heidari notes, King's journals offer "what is so lacking in her published autobiography: humor, irony, and a more candid assessment of herself and others. The Grace King of the autobiography is an interesting subject, but the Grace King of her journals is alive and compelling." King's journals became a sourcebook for writing ideas, an outlet for opinions on current issues that she felt uncomfortable discussing publicly, and a record of her experiences at home and on her travels in the northern United States and Europe. She also used her journals as a form of therapy for her grief over the loss of loved ones and for her regrets, both personal and professional." "This volume comprises King's journals of 1886-1901, 1904, and 1907-1910. Heidari's introduction discusses what the journals reveal about such topics as the lives of unmarried women in the nineteenth-century South, the ways Victorian families dealt with diseases like alcoholism and depression, and the challenges facing women writers of the period."--Jacket.

One of America's greatest classical scholars, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) was also a Civil War journalist. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, and a self-described "southerner beyond dispute," he received his doctorate in Germany and returned to America an enthusiastic advocate of Greek scholarship. Like every male member of his immediate family (including his father), Gildersleeve enlisted after Fort Sumter, but he continued to teach at the University of Virginia during the winters. Frequenting Richmond during the war, this young intellectual and passionate partisan who found the war, with its attendant social and political issues, as stimulating as his beloved classics. In Soldier and Scholar, editor Ward Briggs has assembled a revealing collection of Gildersleeve's writings: autobiographical essays, sixty-three editorials he wrote for the Richmond Examiner during the war, and a series of his reflections upon the causes and effects of the Civil War thirty years later. Unlike published Civil War diaries, the editorials do not merely record daily occurrences and impressions; they analyze military, social, economic, and political events, setting them in a larger ethical and historical context. Infused with the rhetoric of Gildersleeve's classical training, these pieces are frequently vitriolic attacks not only on the evil and immoral Yankees, miscegenation, Jews, and critics of slavery, but also on Jefferson Davis, his hapless Confederate administration, and the struggling Southern armies.