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Title: Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman by Charles East, Sarah Morgan, Sarah Morgan Dawson ISBN: 0-671-78503-6 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: October, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Adolescent angst, southern style.
Comment: Much touted "Southern Womanhood" at it's most self-absorbed. You get it all here. Crinolines, silks, swoons, duels, sabres, smiling slaves, dashing officers, horrid yankees laying waste to all that is beautiful and noble, backbiting jealousies, scandal. All of the stuff that made "Gone With the Wind" a bestseller. Tennessee Williams would have had a grand time with this narcissistic young lady. A modern day psychologist could have made a fortune on her. Imagine an egomaniacal preppie girl in a civil war setting and you have Sarah Morgan. She sighs, she weeps, she yearns for death to relieve her imagined sufferings. Gallant Confederate officers lay court to her and her sister, while she denies that they could take an interest in her plain, ordinary, self. This after spending endless pages describing her preparations to meet them, entertain them, etc. She is remarkable for her ability to deceive herself. Other than how it affects herself or her narrow circle, she is oblivious to what's happening around her. Battles that slaughtered thousands are barely, if at all, acknowledged. The slaves are pictured as happy, singing, smiling, non-entities who amaze and anger her when they give up their joyful lives to run off the the horrid yankees. Some of the other reviewers have called her a sort of "pre-feminist". A long, very long, stretch based on her mild yearnings "to be a man", or "being a worthless woman." Hardly Anthony or Stanton, or even Mary Chesnut. For the most part, she accepts, even embraces, the status quo. She describes endlessly and picturesquely her mourning over her brother killed in a duel over an imagined slight, but never questions the idiocy of the "code duello". She blathers about the "gallant grey coats", but ridicules and snickers at the common soldiers. She has no use for the lesser classes and disdains, with horror, any contact with them. There is no high adventure or heroics here. Though she whines a lot, her actual suffering is minimal. She and her family abandon their house in Baton Rouge (because of a threatened Confederate attack) and end up in a 3 story mansion in New Orleans provided by her Unionist brother. Two other brothers die of disease in the war which illicits melodramatic scenes of grief in which she portrays herself as outwardly stoic but suffering in martyred silence. In short, she is a typical adolescent, concerned only with how she looks to her circle.
Having said all that, I liked the book. It gives a vivid portrait of the thinking of what I imagine was common among the upper crust of Southern society during the horrendous slaughter they initiated. Arrogant,self-satisfied, self-righteous, horribly self-absorbed, and ruthless. By the end of the book, I wished Sherman had been less restrained, and reconstruction a lot more successful.
If you would prefer someone who actually thinks about the issues, who reports on the happenings, who questions the icons, try Mary Chesnut. Her attitudes aren't all that much different (with some notable exceptions), but her feelings are real, and, unlike Sarah, she does divorce herself from her mirror.
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautifully written
Comment: When reading this superb Civil War diary the reader is immediately struck by two things. One, it is hard to believe that so young a woman could have expressed herself and her feelings so beautifully, and two, it is even more amazing that everything contain in this diary is exactly as Sarah Morgan wrote it originally. That is to say, it was not polished and edited afterwards (as Mary Chestnut intended to do, but was not able). If you want to take a glimpse at what living through four years of war was like for a Southern family and especially a young Southern woman you need look no further.
Rating: 5
Summary: Intimate, vivid and unforgettable!
Comment: What an amazing book! To read this book is to take a trip back in
time. Not a politically correct book, but the diaries of a complex
young woman who was haughty and kind, flirtatious and proper,
deferential to men and determined to be an independent spinster. Sarah
Morgan was a rebel in terms of both her Southern heritage and her
pre-feminism beliefs. Her words depict a white world-view that doesn't
recognize its own racism, as well as her personal defiance of
society's expectations of her as a woman. She was a talented writer
with opinions that varied from modern, by today's standards, to
cripplingly in sync with the standards of 1860s Louisiana. As a Civil
War book, as a woman's memoir, and as a journey into one of the United
States' most fascinating and tragic times, this book is truly
outstanding.
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Title: Diary from Dixie by Mary Chesnut ISBN: 0517182661 Publisher: Gramercy Pub. Date: 25 March, 1997 List Price(USD): $10.99 |
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Title: Mary Chesnut's Civil War by C. Vann Woodward, C. Vann Woodard, Mary B. Chestnut ISBN: 0300029799 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: February, 1983 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: The Plantation Mistress by Catherine Clinton ISBN: 0394722531 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 February, 1984 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868 (Library of Southern Civilization) by Kate Stone, John Q. Anderson, Drew Gilpin Faust ISBN: 0807120170 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The War the Women Lived: Female Voices from the Confederate South by Walter Sullivan ISBN: 1879941309 Publisher: J S Sanders & Co Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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