A Diary From Dixie [Paperback]

Mary Boykin Chesnut (Author), Ben A. Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1961

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

It is hardly too much to say that what Samuel Pepys's diary is to the reign of Charles II, Mary Boykin Chesnut's is to the Confederacy. To thousands now and in years to come it will be a fascinating source of information, an invaluable aid to the understanding of a great period, and a lasting delight. (Saturday Review )

Mary Boykin Chesnut steps out alive from the pages of her journal as beautiful, vivacious, flirtatious, warm-hearted, cool-thinking, astonishingly frank and wonderfully articulate...The book is very quotable. (New York Times )

Filled with gossip, stories, laughter and tears, it points up gaieties and tragedies of a nation at war with itself. Entertaining yet constantly reflecting the gravity of these years, this holds much interest for the thoughtful reader and deserves a glance from historians seeking to interpret this tragic era. (Library Journal ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 572 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company (January 1, 1961)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395083516
• ISBN-13: 978-0395083512
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,870,978 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Superseded Edition of a Classic, April 9, 2005

By 

Smallchief - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Diary from Dixie (Paperback)

Mary Chesnut's diary of life in the South during the American Civil War is possibly the best of all American diaries. You could spend weeks making your way through the labyrinth of events -- trivial and important -- and personalities found in the diary.

This edition of the diary is superseded by a better one: "Mary Chesnut's Civil War" edited by C. Vann Woodward which won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. Woodward's edition offers a more complete text and is heavily footnoted with explanatory material. The text in Woodward includes many interesting passages excluded from "A Diary from Dixie" because of limitations of space and because some of them reflected unfavorably on the South and Southerners.

One virtue of this edition is a fine foreword about the diary by literary critic Edmund Wilson, but Wilson's foreword can also be read in his book "Patriotic Gore." I recommend you read Woodward's "Mary Chesnut's Civil War" instead of this book.

Smallchief

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life (apparently heavily edited) under the Confederacy, March 3, 2001

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Diary from Dixie (Paperback)

I was unaware, until I read the previous reviewer's remarks, of the fact that this was a heavily edited version of Chestnut's Journals, of which broad and more forthright passages had been deleted. Certainly, more liveliness is needed here to keep one's rapt attention. But, of course, this is a fault inherent in journals as a genre, such as those of Samuel Pepys for instance, every day can not be a page out of The Three Musketeers. Chestnut, as has been noted, is both cultured and independently minded, debunking the myths of Southern ignorance and complacency, especially among women. This alone makes the book an interesting read. Nevertheless, one grows weary after a while, slogging along to the pathetic outcome that we know awaits the trials under which this woman bears up so bravely.-What interested me the most was that, at times, there are sparks of poetic insight that could have sprung straight from Faulkner or even Proust, such as "Of all our sorrows, memory is the worst." p.102 or "Time works its wonders like enchantment." p.141 One ponders what would have been the outcome had Ms. Chestnut turned her hand to novels or poetry!-I only gave the book 4 stars because of the expurgation of the journals and the slogging reading at times. But I'm going to check out the texts mentioned by the previous reviewer and hopefully return with an extra star tacked on to my reviews.

3.0 out of 5 stars A highwayscribery Book Report, September 12, 2010

By 

Stephen Siciliano "the highway scribe" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: A Diary from Dixie (Classic Reprint) (Paperback)

If the Confederacy had survived Lincoln's invasion, Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut might be a household name in the literary world.

And that's pretty good when one considers that her oeuvre was written without the slightest whiff of literary pretension or ambition.

highwayscribery is not sure if a deep interest in the Civil War, from the southern side of things, is necessary for her scribbling prowess to impress. But if it's there, "A Diary from Dixie" is for you.

Chesnut was well-positioned to chronicle Dixie's misery both as a South Carolina lady intimate with Jefferson Davis and his wife, and wife to a Confederate officer whose competence is apparent in his upward trajectory throughout the book's (and war's) course.

The authoress succeeds in engaging the reader without any real structure other than the natural chronology of events as she lives them. The gentle lady moseys from one happening to another, recounting those things she witnesses, and those others have told her about, with nary a transition.

But the recounting is so casual, the prose so clean, the reader is niever tried, taxed or bored. Chesnut was a feeling, seeing person with the literary chops to put what she felt and saw into words, as in this passage describing the family plantation, Mulberry, in Camden, South Carolina:

"It is so lovely here in spring. The giants of the forest -- the primeval oaks, water-oaks, live-oaks, willow-oaks, such as I have not seen since I left here -- with opopanax, violets, roses, and yellow jessamine, the air is laden with perfume. Araby the Blest was never sweeter."

There are fascinating, first-hand insights in "Diary" as to the way slaves and masters interacted, and the ambiguous attitude of negroes in the south when freedom beckoned, but their familiar world crumbled.

Chesnut's tones are not the stark blacks and whites of Harriet Beecher Stowe's south, rather a wide array of grays.

The relations between the furiously independent member states are also depicted, with Virginians, and Kentuckians, and Carolinians both north and south, remarked upon for their peculiar, geographically bound traits.

In these times, as a single electronic culture inexorably engulfs humanity, it is interesting to read about the differences between neighboring communities and see how they celebrated those differences.

The book's tone morphs from light to dark as the northern noose tightens around the Confederacy's neck. Noteworthy is the early opinion, expressed by rebels in high places, that the South had no chance of winning the war.

"Diary" tells us that had clearer heads prevailed, the cataclysm might have been averted.

The dominant portrait is that of a small, agrarian society confronting a behemoth that will leave no stone unturned, no home unburned, and kill-off a generation of fine young men -- not all of then enamored with slavery -- so much as loyal to their homeland.

"Others dropped in after dinner; some without arms, some without legs; von Boreke, who can not speak because of a wound in his throat. Isabella said, 'We have all kinds now, but a blind one.' Poor fellows, they laugh at wounds. 'And they yet can show many a scar.'"

Chesnut is in the rearguard, her lofty status slowly reduced to a state of hunger bourn with ladylike dignity. Hers is the Confederate women's story, a dreadful enumeration of lost sons, sundered families, and mothers literally dying from grief.

"Isabella says that war leads to love-making. She says these soldiers do more courting here in a day than they would do at home, without a war, in ten years."

Perhaps most valuable are those anecdotes Chesnut recorded which give the war between the states, and the Confederacy in particular, a greater depth and richer texture.

Without her we might not have known that President Davis' little boy died at home, nor of the suspicions that a turncoat on staff, or a spy snuck into the house, actually killed him in a cruel effort to demoralize Dixie.

The tragic deaths of innocents stepping out from a cave for some air in Vicksburg during the Union siege might have gone unrecorded. We could not be aware that France's last Count de Choiseul had thrown his lot in with the south and died for it, too.

Without her desperate scribblings, we would have known only the winner's account, and been denied the terrible beauties associated with losing, which is so much a part of life.