Queen Bee of the Confederacy

(NYTimes) When I first encountered Mary Chesnut as a starting point for exploring the American Civil War while an undergraduate at Harvard, I could not have been more fortunate. She provided a riveting antidote to the “fiddle-dee-dee” school of southern womanhood on which I had been weaned as a teenager in the 1960s. Although Scarlett O’Hara was a beguiling screen heroine, Mary Boykin Chesnut was a flesh and blood Rebel, whose wartime scribbling brought to life intimate and important aspects of southern culture. Since its publication in 1905, Chesnut’s diary has become compelling reading. Continued