Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography

Foreword

Foreword MARY CHESNUT is remembered only for one incomparable book she wrote on her experience of the Civil War. "But one cannot read more than a page or two," as her biographer says, "without wishing to know more about the author herself." That alone would be enough tojustify a biography. Mary Chesnut's reading public has grown greatly since the first fragmentary and scrambled editions of her work appeared earlier in the present century, as has the curiosity and puzzlement of her readers about the author of this nineteenth-century classic. Food for curiosity and puzzlement exists in abundance. Mary Chesnut was a complex and paradoxicalpersonality,and her book often does more to multiply than to answer the questions that it raises about the author. Among them are the puzzles of how such strong antislavery sentiment was bred in the very heart of a slave society and how such vehement feminism burst out of a thoroughly patriarchal order. Here was an essentially secularminded intellect in the midst of a deeply religious community, an independent-minded intellectual planted in the elite of a traditionalist social system. She loved city life and lived a rural life. Her interests were cosmopolitan and her existence parochial. She could at times be as arrogant and ambitious as the males she scorned, yet she always had an eye for appealing men and the capacityto charm when she chose. These are but a few of the traits that challengeall the talents a biographer can muster. Mary Chesnut has been singularly fortunate in her biographer. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld knows more about her subject than anybody ever has and uses her knowledge with the subtlety, grace, and intelligence that characterize her essays on WilliamFaulkner. {xii} FOREWORD Her mastery of the sources is grounded on close study of all the surviving Chesnut manuscripts, correspondence, and related materials . Her command of the evidence has been enhanced by her work on the transcription and collation of the surviving parts of the original Chesnut diaries and the version of the 188os. In addition Professor Muhlenfeld has prepared a superior edition of Chesnut's unpublished novels and other works, available in microfilm. In the preparation of a scholarly and full edition of the Chesnut book, under the title Mary Chesnut's Civil War,the present writer found the work of Elisabeth Muhlenfeld indispensable. Of prime importance were the values, the skills, and the example of literary scholarship that contributed to and often challenged the historical values and principles that the editor brought to the work. These values were not always completely reconcilable. But the literary scholar forced the historian to acknowledge that he was dealing with a literary as well as a historical document. In this service and in her admirable biography of Mary Chesnut, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has placed American literature as well as American history in her debt. C. VANN WOODWARD Yale University, 1980 ...