Description: Capturing the fluctuating cultural environment of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, Davis's stories explore such issues as racial prejudice and slavery, the powerlessness of women, and the effects of postwar market capitalism on the working classes. They also position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism.
Review Quotes:
Rebecca Harding Davis's stories illuminate the ambiguities of Civil War America--the disjuncture between the political rhetoric of war and daily life on the homefront, the reversals of emancipation in a world where Confederate masters have become prisoners, and the grinding injuries of poverty during and after the war. Above all, they show the complexities of wars waged by women, sometimes in relation to armed engagements but more often in struggles for self-definition. The ten stories in this anthology provide fresh perspectives on the wartime era and, in so doing, make an important contribution to our understanding of Davis, nineteenth-century women's writing, and the literature of the Civil War.
--Elizabeth Young "author of Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War"