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Reviews379 enee, although gender and its role in Dawson's life are examined. Ellen Peel's "Semiotic Subversion in 'Desiree's Baby,' " offers an intriguing assessment of the semiotic and political approaches to Kate Chopin's widely anthologized work, but critical language frequently overwhelms the essay. "Evangeline's Darker Daughters: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Postwar Louisiana" by Alice Parker is a critical reading of Sidonie De la Houssaye's French text, Les Quateronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans (The Quadroons ofNew Orleans). However, Parker's esoteric analysis of De la Houssaye's difficulty in exploring issues of race, gender, and sexuality would be formidable to many readers. The finest segment of this entire text is the bibliography. Dorothy H. Brown's "A Note on the Bibliography" entertains while clearly stating the bibliography's parameters: (1) women who wrote chiefly in the genres of poetry, drama, and fiction; (2) native Louisiana women who either remained to pursue their careers or who wrote elsewhere; (3) women who were educated in the state, moved there to make it their home, or who visited for extended periods; and (4) women who wrote in English (De la Houssaye's work is the exception). Brown also explains some of the difficulties in selecting appropriate information from the various sources. Each entry contains biographical statistics, data on each author's body of works, and secondary document information, all of which serves as a guide to further research and to gauging the writers' popularity, whether in their own time or afterwards. Brown impressively meets the tremendous challenge of being as complete as possible, especially in supplying comprehensive material from out-of-print or relatively inaccessible nineteenth-century reference works. The 113-page bibliography places writers in three sections: nineteenth century, approximately sixty-two entries; twentieth century (deceased), approximately thirty-seven; and contemporary writers, approximately ninety-seven. Dearest Chums and Partners—Joel Chandler Harris's Letters to His Children: A Domestic Biography. Edited by Hugh T. Keenan. University of Georgia Press, 1993. 531 pp. Cloth, $39.95. Reviewed by David B. Parker, assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State College, who is Tar Heel bom and bred. Parker is the author ofAlias Bill Arp: Charles Henry Smith and the South's "Goodly Heritage." As his children began to leave home in the 1890s, Joel Chandler Harris often took time away from his Uncle Remus stories and other projects to write letters to them. After Harris's death in 1908 a number of these letters were reprinted or excerpted in Uncle Remus's Home Magazine and in Julia Collier Hanis's Life and Letters ofJoel Chandler Harris, for years the standard biography. Now Hugh T. Keenan, professor of English at Georgia State University, gives us Dearest Chums and Partners. Keenan's volume, complete with introduction, annotations , chronology, and the other scholarly apparatus one expects in a definitive collection , contains all of the nearly three hundred surviving letters from Harris to his children. AU but two of the letters are in the Harris Collection at Emory University's Woodruff Library. The book's main title is from a letter Harris wrote to daughters Lillian and Mildred while they were students at Saint Joseph's Academy, a Catholic school in Washington, 380Southern Cultures Georgia. Harris's letters to his "dearest chums and partners" fill more than half the book. They are often playful, with riddles, puns, poems, and drawings. The letters also tend to be quite lengthy. "I haven't the least idea what I'm going to write about," Harris noted at the beginning of one letter, but he went on for two pages about the weather, his cows, sick children in the neighborhood, a magazine subscription, chimney cleaning, grandchildren, and so on. It became a running joke. "There is positively nothing to write about in this neck of the woods," he told the girls in another letter packed with news about the rain, the death of a calf, the welfare of two new puppies, visits from friends, and more. This is the trivial side of the "domestic biography" of Keenan's subtitle: more than you ever wanted to know about Joel Chandler Harris's private daily life. But there are...

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