Download e-book for kindle: Genteel Rebel: The Life of Mary Greenhow Lee (Southern by Sheila R. Phipps

This elegantly written biography depicts the mixed impact of social constitution, personality, and nationwide problem on a woman’s existence. Mary Greenhow Lee (1819–1907) was once raised in a privileged Virginia family. As a tender girl, she flirted with President Van Buren’s son, drank tea with Dolley Madison, and hung out in bedsheets throughout the streets of Washington together with her sister-in-law, destiny accomplice secret agent Rose O’Neal Greenhow. Later in existence, Lee debated with senators, fed international emissaries and correspondents, scolded generals, and nursed squaddies. As a accomplice sympathizer within the hotly contested small border city of Winchester, Virginia, she ran an underground postal provider, concealed contraband less than her nieces’ clothes, abetted the insurgent reason, and was once ultimately banished.

Lee’s own background is an exciting tale. it's also an account of the advanced social relatives that characterised nineteenth-century lifestyles. She was once an elite southern lady who knew the principles yet who additionally flouted and different occasions flaunted the existing gender preparations. Her perspectives on prestige recommend that the immeasurable markers of status have been even more very important than wealth in her social stratum. She had powerful rules approximately who used to be (or was once now not) her “equal,” but she married a guy of really modest capacity. Lee’s biography additionally enlarges our view of accomplice patriotism, revealing a conflict inside a conflict and divisions coming up as a lot from politics and geography as from problems with slavery and class.

Mary Greenhow Lee was once a girl of her time and position — one whose younger uprising opposed to her society’s criteria yielded to her wish to guard that society’s lifestyle. Genteel Rebel illustrates the worth of biography as historical past because it narrates the eventful lifetime of a shockingly robust southern woman.