Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Allan Gurganus
- First Published: 1989
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The mid-nineteenth century to the 1980’s
- Setting: Falls, North Carolina, and Antietam, Maryland
- Principal Characters: Lucy Marsden, Captain William More Marsden, Ned Smythe, Castalia, Lady More Marsden, Winona Smythe, Maimie L. Beech, Shirley Williams
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, South or Southerners, Slavery or slaves, Social issues, Marriage, Civil War, Farms, farmers, or farming, Storytelling, Confederate States of America
- Locales: Antietam, MD, Falls, NC
It is not surprising that a Civil War novel should concern the theme of freedom, since nearly everyone involved in that conflict insisted that it was a struggle for freedom. The Northerners were willing to die to free the slaves; the Southerners resisted their aggression, fighting for their own freedom. Like the historians who have pointed out that the causes of the war were far more complex than the oratory of the time would indicate, however, Allan Gurganus makes it clear in his novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All that slavery was only one of the institutions that...
[The entire page is 1969 words long]
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