A Northern Woman in the Plantation South: Letters of Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox 1856-1876 (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South) - Softcover

Fox, Tryphena Blanche H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1570031886 ISBN 13: 9781570031885

Publisher: University of South Carolina Press, 1997

Synopsis

The wife of a physician, mother of ten children, and mistress of five slaves, Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox, fought the isolation of her adopted home by maintaining a lively correspondence with family and friends in Massachusetts. This work provides a candid look at middle-class southern life.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Isolated shortly before the Civil War by her marriage to a far from affluent doctor who treated planters and slaves in a tiny Louisiana river parish, Massachusetts-born Tryphena Fox responded to these circumstances by corresponding with her relatives. The 81 letters collected here reveal the writer as a resourceful woman, much concerned with family, who harbored intellectual and social aspirations. The correspondence is annotated and unobtrusively edited by Michigan State University American history professor King. Though regrettably making only rare mention of politics in Fox's time, the letters reflect the struggle for survival of a middle-class couple and 10 children, as well as the author's all-too-typical view of slaves as mostly "unreliable . . . lazy and impudent," along wtih her rage at Yankees who ravaged the South--including the Fox home. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Fox left her home in Massachusetts to tutor children in Mississippi in 1852. She subsequently married a handsome medical doctor and moved to a rural Louisiana community along the Mississippi River near New Orleans. Her diaries present a rare glimpse of the life of a middle-class woman of that era. King (Michigan State Univ.) has edited 81 of the 187 letters Fox wrote to her mother from 1856 to 1876. This work includes a number of diaries never before published, some collections of unpublished correspondence, and a few reprints of published diaries. Some of the letters are tedious laments of Fox's frustration at having to do daily chores instead of living like a plantation queen. Yet they also chronicle her trials of being a "stranger in a strange land." Recommended for libraries with other primary source material.
- Belinda J. Pugh, Kings Bay Base Lib., Ga.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1570031886
• ISBN 13: 9781570031885
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Hunter Wilma King-