ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the diaries and letters left by Erin S. Young, elite white slaveholding women, focusing on Underwood, Sarah Morgan, and Myra Inman. As wealthy Southern women raised in leisure, these women saw novel reading and journal keeping as emotionally and intellectually important parts of their lives. The chapter looks at a selection of popular novels read by Southern women and uses the diaries of prolific readers to examine the interaction between text and reader in the inner life of the latter. It offers suggestive hints as to the dialectic nature of Southern women's relationship with popular literature and its place in the negotiation of their subjective political identities. There is a significant volume of scholarship detailing the experience of Southern white women during the Civil War—their adoption of new roles outside the domestic sphere, their unfolding relationship with grief and loss, and their often shifting views on the institution of slavery and their place within it.