Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937.

Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937. By Sarah E. Gardner. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. x, 341. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2818-1.)

In one of her most famous criticisms of southern writing, Ellen Glasgow declared that an infusion of "blood and irony" would be necessary to correct the anemic sentimentality that she believed was its hallmark. Sarah E. Gardner finds an unyielding defense of the South in southern white women's writings during the nineteenth century. Only in the twentieth century did much creativity or any irony appear in the accounts that she analyzes. Gardner uses written texts, both fiction and nonfiction, personal as well as published, to show how white southern women wrote about and interpreted the Civil War. Her foreword sets out three goals: "illustrat[ing] the transformative impact of the Civil War on southern women's historical imaginations," showing a dialogue about the war among these southern female writers, and uncovering women's role in creating the myth of the Lost Cause (p. 4).

Gardner begins with the war as she examines diaries and letters as well as the fiction of the best-selling author Augusta Jane Evans. Here Gardner suggests the war was an important transition when women's purpose for diary keeping changed from effecting self-improvement to recording battles and national political events. Although these wartime stories lacked an ending, they indicated many aspects of sectional vindication that would continue. After Appomattox, women's versions of the Civil War lost that open-ended nature because "no story of the war could be told without the pervading sense of Confederate defeat" (p. 37). In the versions that quickly emerged, the defeat was foreordained, sometimes part of a divine plan.

Although Gardner believes that the Confederate defeat sapped women's writing initiative for a few years, even during Reconstruction women fashioned new stories that helped create the Lost Cause myth. Gardner acknowledges a multiplicity of narratives in the late nineteenth century. She believes most writers glorified the South but argues that a few of them, like Mary Noailles Murfee, had a tragic vision of the conflict. In Gardner's view, southern white female writers generally avoided narratives of reunification featuring a North-South marriage.

The strongest sections of Gardner's book cover the role of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in creating nonfictional and fictional orthodoxy at the turn of the twentieth century. Not only did the UDC strive for stories and histories that vindicated secession and the South' s conduct of the war, this organization also helped to guarantee a market for the histories and memoirs of southern women. Indeed, Gardner asserts that it was UDC backing that gave women the confidence to shift from writing the biographies of Confederate leaders to recording their own memoirs.

Moreover, the orthodox account of the Civil War became so dominant that even critics like Ellen Glasgow and Mary Johnston were unable to escape it completely. Glasgow still shared some of the sentimentalism of that era; and Johnston, while finding war absurd rather than noble, still believed in the rightness of the secessionist position. In Gardner's estimation, only Caroline Gordon's None Shall Look Back (1937) managed to bring modernist sensibility to the Civil War story. It was Gordon's misfortune to publish her book the year after Gone with the Wind appeared and became a phenomenally popular version of the southern view.

As a historian who has analyzed southern romances of reunion, I find some of Gardner's choices of texts and readings of nineteenth-century women writers unconvincing. For example, she cites Mary G. McClelland's 1893 novel Broadoaks to argue that McClelland "refused to offer her readers a reconciliation romance" even though a decade earlier McClelland's second book, Princess, had featured just such a North-South union (p. 88). While indicating the collapse of the heroine's intersectional romance in Sherwood Bonner's Like unto Like (1878), Gardner fails to note that the heroine's best friend married a Union soldier.

Some readers may wish that Gardner had considered more carefully the context in which southern women wrote. While she is persuasive that the Civil War motivated educated southern white women to write, she tends to take for granted that it remained as important to them later in the century. Here her combination of memoirists, Civil War biographers, and novelists may be somewhat misleading. Most likely these first two groups continued to believe in the primacy of the Civil War far more than did southern women novelists. Indeed, some of the most published and best-selling female authors of fiction set their stories in other time periods and emphasized other themes, especially after 1880. Still, Gardner has given us a provocative account of women's contribution to the southern version of the Civil War story.

JANE TURNER CENSER

George Mason University