Best Companions: Letters of Eliza Middleton Fisher and Her Mother, Mary Hering Middleton, from Charleston, Philadelphia, and Newport, 1839-1846.

Edited by Eliza Cope Harrison. Women's Diaries and Letters of the South. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xliv], 532. $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-375-7.)

Best Companions integrates three collections of letters between South Carolinian Mary Middleton and her daughter Eliza Fisher. The correspondence, held at the South Carolina Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and privately by the editor's family, appears in published form for the first time in this evocative volume. Space constraints forced the exclusion of nearly half the existing Middleton-Fisher letters. But Harrison's fine editing and her interspersed commentary provide a nearly seamless tale, and her presentation of Fisher and Middleton's capacious writing makes a compelling read. Unfortunately, the index privileges persons over themes and will not prove very helpful for scholars hoping to scan the volume. Historians of women, family, and the antebellum South, however, will enjoy lingering over this delightful correspondence.

The Fisher-Middleton letters commenced in May 1839 after Eliza married Francis Fisher and left Charleston for his home in Philadelphia. The Middleton family annually summered in Newport, Rhode Island, and beginning in 1839 the Fishers joined them at the resort. Eliza and Mary could therefore count on being together several months each year, but the remaining time required separation. To bridge that gap, the women promised to write weekly--a pledge they honored until Mary moved to Philadelphia in 1846 following the death of her husband, Henry Middleton. The seven years of letters that passed between Charleston, Philadelphia, and Newport not only provide evidence of the abiding affection between this mother and daughter but also afford historians greater appreciation of the world these women inhabited.

The Middletons and Fishers numbered among antebellum America's cosmopolitan elite. While Middleton Place, their plantation outside Charleston, represented home to Eliza and Mary, both also resided in the larger Atlantic world. Mary lived ten years in Russia while her husband served there as the U.S. minister. Eliza spent much of her youth in Europe and her married life in Pennsylvania. Such travels, in addition to summers in Newport and sojourns along the Atlantic seaboard, moved these women beyond the confining plantation South. Their intellectual curiosity, coupled with their travels, led Eliza and Mary to comment on a fascinating range of issues. Railroad travel, homeopathic medicine, Texas annexation, economic crises, scientific writings, literature, and music all garnered the attention of these astute and, thankfully, verbose women.

Most important, this correspondence illuminates family life in antebellum America. The letters reveal the deep attachment between mother and daughter. One cannot help empathizing with Eliza as she repeatedly describes her disappointment at watching the postman pass, taking with him the hope of heating from home. Similarly, one feels Mary's frustration at spending winters at Middleton Place, where "there will be no chance for my forwarding a letter for perhaps a fortnight, unless some chance visitor should come" (p. 109). The letters also underscore shifts in their family life: Eliza bears children and struggles with her compulsively interfering mother-in-law; two of Mary's sons marry European women; the family patriarchs (Henry Middleton and Fisher's uncle, George Harrison) die in the 1840s. Through Middleton and Fisher's writings, the reader appreciates the overwhelming power of men in antebellum society and women's growing resentment of that power. Mary, in particular, struggles with a controlling, capricious husband. For no apparent reason other than the desire to control his wife, he subverted the women's desires to be together when Eliza delivered children. Eliza, far more willing to challenge her father than Mary was, insisted in 1844 that Mary ignore Henry and "put yourself entirely under my command" (p. 388). Eliza vowed to bear the burden of her father's rebuke, which seemed a small price for her mother's company. In such passages, too numerous to recount in this review, Best Companions reveals the experiences and values of antebellum southern elites.

LORRI GLOVER
University of Tennessee, Knoxville