The Lee Girls

by Mary Price Coulling

Overview

This book chronicles the lives of Robert E. Lee's four daughters from 1834 to the death of the last surviving daughter in 1918. Using diaries and letters, Coulling follows the women from their idyllic childhood at their ancestral Arlington home through the hardships of war and the turmoil after the war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780895875365
Publisher:	Blair
Publication date:	04/24/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

A graduate of Agnes Scott College, Mary Price Coulling has devoted over forty years to intensive study of nineteenth-century American women and the Civil War. Her biography of Robert E. Lee’s daughters, The Lee Girls, has gone through six printings. She began the biography of the Lee girls after discovering a cache of unpublished letters written by the daughters of Robert E. Lee while doing research for an article in a Washington and Lee University publication. She is also the author of Margaret Junkin Preston: A Biography, which is now out of print. She lives in Lexington, Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

Raised in aristocratic luxury, Confederate leader Robert E. Lee's four daughtersMary, Anne, Eleanor and Mildredwere forced to adjust to privation caused by the Civil War. This gentle book tells the story of their struggle to maintain their gracious lifestyle. It is at once a sunny and poignant tale, for the childhood days at Arlington were idyllic, but when Lee rode off to war they ended abruptly and never were recaptured. The book stresses the passivity Southern society imposed on women of the era, particularly unmarried women. None of Lee's daughters married, and Coulling's theory is that they were unable to find suitors who could hold a candle to their noble father. As for Lee himself, the Confederate icon appears here in unexpected guise from time to time. A great teaser of his daughters, he suggested, for example, that their mischievous pet squirrel be turned into soup. Coulling is a Virginia-based freelance writer. Photos. (June 29)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly