"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

Description

The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Capturing the fluctuating cultural environment of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the stories explore such issues as racial prejudice and slavery, the loneliness and powerlessness of women, and the effects of postwar market capitalism on the working classes. Davis’s characters include soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old, blacks and whites. Instead of focusing (like many writers of the period) on major conflicts and leaders, Davis takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads, delving into the minds of those who experienced the destruction on both sides of the conflict.

Davis spent the war years in the Pennsylvania and Virginia borderlands, a region she called a “vast armed…

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