An Evening When Alone Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 182767

A book that will greatly enhance understanding of the situation of single women in the nineteenth-century South, An Evening When Alone presents the journals of four very different women who, although their lives were worlds apart, each lived and wrote in the South during the years 1827-67. Intimate and revealing, these journals provide refreshing insight into the joys and travails of "ordinary" single women in the nineteenth century South: courtship, disappointed love, illness, the gratifications and pains of female friendship, the grief of the Civil War, the ambivalences of family life, and the difficulty and consolation of religion.

Michael O'Brien is Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History at Miami University and Senior Mellon Scholar in American History at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History; The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941; and A Character of Hugh Legare.