Two Novels by Mary Chesnut (review)

Although Mary Chesnut is best known for her diaries, her novels chronicling the antebellum and wartime South have remained unpublished until now. While Chesnut never finished writing and revising her texts, two of her novels are now available thanks to Elizabeth Muhlenfeld's diligent research and editing. Likewise, Elizabeth Hanson's thoughtful introduction provides a context in which to understand not only the novels' characters and plots, but also their famous author. These novels portray strong, intelligent women who often challenge the status quo, thus revealing much about contemporary notions of gender roles, education, women's networks, and slavery.

In The Captain and the Colonel Chesnut dramatizes the tensions between a widowed mother, Joanna Effingham, and her four daughters from the antebellum to the postwar years. The primary story line follows the romantic life of Emily, the youngest and most willful of the sisters. Chesnut draws on many instances from her famous journal, such as women's wartime work in Richmond hospitals, to depict the devastating and transforming effect of the war on the entire South. By the novel's end we find that the war has even softened the unrelenting Mrs. Effingham's heart toward Emily's beau, Colonel Collingwood.

Chesnut weaves a tale of romance and betrayal around the tensions of war, though her prose is often difficult to follow. Even so, she provides an alternative window into the world of wartime southern women. While they might claim to be proper Victorian ladies, her characters are anything but: the daughters mock their mother and the middle daughter, Susan, secretly weds without her mother's approval. Even before her husband's death, Mrs. Effingham defies Victorian stereotypes of passionless, submissive women. Not only does she deceive a suitor into marrying her sister, but she also arranges her eldest daughter's marriage in defiance of Mr. Effingham. Despite their strong opinions and independent actions, the Effingham women who challenge Victorian ideology appear to triumph, while the weak and docile sister, Margaret, attempts suicide.

Two Years—or, The Way We Lived Then is a fictional yet intensely autobiographical account of Chesnut's life in the antebellum years. As Hanson notes in her introduction, this novel's plot is much more linear than the first, though it remains fragmentary because two chapters were missing and because Chesnut had difficulty sustaining narrative structures. Part travel narrative, part portrait of a schoolgirl's life, Two Years illuminates the relationships between Helen and her peers at a Charleston boarding school and her young beau. When her parents discover that she and her lover walked along the Battery sans chaperone, they withdrew her from the academy and returned her to her father's new plantation on the Mississippi frontier. This turn of plot allows the novel to address complex interactions among the family members, students, teachers, and slaves. After her father's death, Helen marries her lover but remains anxious about the future.

As works in progress, these novels are often challenging to read, but both are useful for the study of southern women's education and the effect of the Civil War on women's private lives. These novels also serve as a helpful addendum to Chesnut's diary, revealing more detail about the men and women in her life. Nevertheless, Chesnut's journals will remain her most important contribution to the literature of the Civil War South.