Overview

When the Civil War began in 1861 Lucy Rebecca Buck was the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prosperous planter, living on her family's plantation in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. On Christmas Day of that year she began a diary which she would keep for the duration of the war, during which time troops were quartered in her home and battles were literally waged in her front yard. This extraordinary chronicle mirrors the experience of many women torn between loyalty to the Confederate cause and dissatisfaction with the unrealistic ideology of white southern womanhood. In powerful, unsentimental language, Buck's diary reveals her anger and ambivalence about the challenges thrust upon her by the upheaval of her self, her family, and the world as she knew it. This document provides an extraordinary glimpse into the ""shadows on the heart"" of both Lucy Buck and the American South.

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9780820340906

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Yields a rare insight into the heart of one Southern woman whose primary pre-war purpose was to serve her societal role.-- Civil War History

Yields a rare insight into the heart of one Southern woman whose primary pre-war purpose was to serve her societal role. -- Civil War History

Author Information

Elizabeth R. Baer is professor of English and genocide studies at Gustavus Adolphus College. She has published widely on women s literature and Holocaust fiction and memoirs. Baer's books include ""The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for Women"" (coedited with Hester Baer) and ""Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust"" (coedited with Myrna Goldenberg). Her forthcoming book, ""The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction,"" traces the intertextual appropriation of the golem legend in contemporary Jewish-American fiction, graphic novels, comics, ""The X-Files,"" and films.""

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