The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier.

The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier. Edited by Giselle Roberts. Publications of the Southern Texts Society. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2004. Pp. lviii, 274. $39.95, ISBN 0-8203-2591-0.)

In this volume, the correspondence between Sarah Morgan and her future husband, Francis Warrington Dawson, editor and owner of the Charleston News and Courier, is juxtaposed with her anonymously written editorials for the year 1873. Most of the letters are from the British-born Dawson, who both courted Morgan and served as her editor and employer. The letters and editorials cover but a single year. Yet they brilliantly illuminate how a once-elite southern belle, best known to historians for her Civil War diaries, struggled to reconcile her postwar identity as a paid writer and independent woman with her longing for the genteel life she had known. These letters and articles illustrate how Morgan--who was determined to survive alone rather than marry just any man or live on the margins of domesticity as a spinster in her brother's household--was drawn into a meaningful relationship with Dawson. Dawson became her suitor, mentor, antagonist, and, ultimately, her protagonist. The letters and editorials, especially those on the meaning of work for women and life as a so-called old maid, show how southern men and women were forced in the aftermath of the Civil War to create new identities in ways that somewhat reconciled old ideals with new realities.

Roberts's insightful introduction places Morgan's correspondence and editorials in the context of the debate about the Civil War as a watershed event for elite southern women. The author comes down on the side of those scholars who contend that old values and roles were renegotiated into new but firmly rooted patterns of life. The correspondence shows something else as well: the story of a man deeply in love with a woman who resisted him mightily while longing to be loved and to love in return. This body of material reveals as much about Dawson as it does about Morgan. What comes through is a woman hardened by her losses and deeply resentful of the intellectual superiority and financial independence of her editor and suitor. His letters to her were affectionate and beseeching but also direct and encouraging. He frequently chastised her as a writer whom he respected and loved enough to be honest about her abilities, which he greatly admired. Her letters were resentful, resisting, and even arrogant, playing with his feelings and distant in tone. In the end, however, she succumbed to Dawson's persistent courting because of his devotion to her and his respect for her as a person. The result was a marriage based on a measure of equality that enabled Morgan to find fulfillment as a wife, mother, and independent woman committed to living in parity with her husband when it came to the life of the mind. Dawson, in turn, was determined to relate to Morgan as a new kind of husband, one respectful of her individuality and her value as a person beyond the roles of mother and wife. Perhaps it was because he was not truly southern--a point that Roberts fails to engage except in passing.

California State University, Northridge 

JOYCE L. BROUSSARD