Beauty from Ashes - Hardcover

Price, Eugenia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385267037 ISBN 13: 9780385267038

Publisher: Doubleday, 1995

Synopsis

Eugenia Price, one of America's most treasured  writers, is back with Beauty From  Ashes, the long-awaited final volume in her  popular Georgia Trilogy. Eugenia Price is America's  first lady of storytelling. For thirty years she has  captivated millions of readers with her sweeping  historical novels of the antebellum South. Now,  with Beauty From Ashes, the final  installment of her Georgia Trilogy (which includes  The New York Times best-seller  Bright Captivity and Where  Shadows Go ), Ms. Price returns to her  beloved South, but it's the South of heartbreak and  Civil War. It is 1852. After recovering from the  death of her husband and her parents, Anne Couper  Fraser is devastated to learn that she has also  lost her home on St. Simons Island. Seeking refuge in  Marietta, Georgia, some three hundred miles from  the solace of her home on the Georgia coast, Anne  finds the perfect house -- a place she can again  call "home." As she is adjusting to this  new life the chill of war sweeps in. And as  happened to so many Southern families, the Frasers split  when Anne's son and grandson, who are loathe to  turn against their Southern roots, enlist in the  Confederate Army. Anne, who sympathizes with the  Unionists, finds her loyalties torn. Then, facing her  own mortality, and befriended by a young Union  doctor, Anne rediscovers the depth of her faith, and  learns that even the cruelest misfortune does not  mean defeat for the human spirit. Filled with  characters drawn from history, lore, and Ms. Price's  own fertile imagination, Beauty From  Ashes is a touching, inspirational story of  courage, love, and friendship that is guaranteed to  capture the hearts and minds of new and devoted  readers alike.

About this title

About the Author:

Eugenia Price, 79, Romance Novelist, Dies

By Robert McG. Thomas Jr., May 30, 1996, The New York Times

Eugenia Price, who turned a chance visit to coastal Georgia into a career as the South's most popular writer of antebellum romantic fiction, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Brunswick, Ga., not far from her home in St. Simons, the island she made famous through a series of novels. She was 79.

Her companion, Joyce Blackburn, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Her hoop-skirted heroines tended to be too unremittingly beautiful, her handsome heroes a shade too dashing and their problems a bit too easily solved for Ms. Price to have won serious literary acclaim. But then again, how many acclaimed authors sell more than 40 million books in 18 languages?

That Ms. Price did just that was a tribute both to her ability as a storyteller and her knack for recreating a bygone era with such compelling and authentic historic detail that, according to the St. Simons's Chamber of Commerce, a substantial majority of the thousands of tourists who visit the island each year come there specifically to scout out the houses, marshes and other locales she used in her novels, not to mention the headstones of the actual people she brought back to life as fictional characters.

Ms. Price, a dentist's daughter from Charleston, W.Va., was a precocious student who entered Ohio University at 16 and later studied dentistry at Northwestern University before dropping out of school to pursue a writing career.

Those familiar with the intensely romantic themes of her fiction would not be surprised that she began her career writing soap operas, initially in Chicago and later in New York and Cincinnati, the headquarters of Procter & Gamble.

An intense conversion to Christianity in the late 1940's altered the course of her life and of her writing. Abandoning soap operas, she began turning out inspirational books -- among them Discoveries, Beloved World, and The Eugenia Price Treasury of Faith -- that won her a wide following long before she turned to fiction.Indeed, it was while on a tour in 1960 to promote one of her two dozen inspirational titles that she and Ms. Blackburn, who had been living in Chicago, happened to stop off in St. Simons and were so enchanted by the beauty and ambiance of the place that they decided they never wanted to leave.It was a measure of their immediate and intense devotion to the island that the two women bought cemetery plots there before they built the house they named Dodge after the real St. Simons clergyman who, with his two wives, became the focus of Ms. Price's first novels, Lighthouse, New Moon Rising, and Beloved Invader.

Those books were such a succcess that she wrote a Florida Trilogy and a Savannah Quartet before a turning out a final Georgia Trilogy, whose return to the familiar St. Simons settings helped propel the first book of the final series, Bright Captivity (1991), to The New York Times best-seller list. The third, Beauty from Ashes (1995), was also a best seller. Her last book, The Waiting Time, is to be published next year by Doubleday.

Ms. Blackburn, a writer who subsumed her own career to serve as Ms. Price's live-in editor, is her only survivor.

From Publishers Weekly:

The conclusion to Price's Georgia Trilogy (Bright Captivity; Where Shadows Go) will please her fans but will probably underwhelm those new to her work. As the story reopens in 1845, Anne Couper Fraser is living with her four children at Lawrence, their beloved home on St. Simons Island. Still mourning her late husband, Anne finds comfort only in an unlikely friendship with Eve, a family slave. When her precarious finances force her to give up Lawrence, she is brokenhearted. Though she moves with her children into her brother's household, she never abandons hope that she will again have a home of her own. Finally, she manages to buy a house in Marietta, a small town outside Atlanta. These are years of great change for Anne and her family. On a visit to Florida, her tomboy daughter, Rebecca, now in her 30s, meets a young doctor who follows her back to Marietta. And Anne finds that not all her children share her strong abolitionist views?daughters Fanny and Selina fall in love with men favoring secession, while her son and her grandson join the Confederate Army when the Civil War breaks out. Anne nobly weathers the many tragedies that war brings (even the occupation of her home by Sherman's troops), but her gentility as a sheltered flower of the Old South may leave many longing for a bit of Scarlett O'Hara's fire. Literary Guild, Doubleday Bookclub, Crossings selection.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0385267037
• ISBN 13: 9780385267038
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 627