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The Power of Love: The Education of a Domestic Woman in Mary Boykin Chesnut's Two Years by Wendy Kurant Though many have enjoyed Mary Boykin Chesnut's witty and insightful observations of southern life in her Civil War diary, few are familiar with her two unpublished novels, Two Years, or The Way We Lived Then and The Captain and the Colonel, written between the end of the war and 1881, when she abandoned the novels to start a major revision of her diary. Fewer still find the novels worthwhile. Even their only editor, Elizabeth Muhlenfeld, admits that reading one of Chesnut's novels is "a confusing experience: fine, clearly realized passages are interspersed with sections that are hopelessly jumbled" (183). "Ill formed offspring" that they are, these novels deserve attention, particularly from anyone interested in Chesnut's view of nineteenth century female experience. Several critics have ardently debated Chesnut's feminism, or lack thereof, evident in her diary, but none has brought her unpublished novels into the conversation. This is a curious omission, as both novels deal with young women experiencing courtship and marriage, and one I hope to correct here. Chesnut's Two Years, or The Way We Lived Then concerns itself
The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Jan 6, 2002
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