Customer Reviews

Lady Baltimore (Southern Classics Series)

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If you are a Southerner with South Carolina roots, you will find this book an enlightening, amazing, amusing,sometimes astounding look into your ancestors's world in the early 1900's.Owen Wister explained much to me about southerners who weren't the rednecks we are so often considered to be.I found Wister's descriptions vivid. They put me there on the streets of King's Point, in the churchyard cemetery with the hero and in his friend,with him at the boarding house dinner table, and with him on the bottom of a boat moored on a woodland stream. I could all but feel the humidity and smell the smells he so evokes in all his scenes.His many tongue in cheek observations gave me belly laughs as I recalled people from long ago.

Many times good writing can overcome poor personal judgments and points of view. Such is the case with this novel. Set in the early 1900s in South Carolina, it is basically a long discussion between a Northern visitor and several different Southerners. Wister shows much sympathy for the plight of the upper echelon white Southerners who felt they lost a complete way of life after the Civil War. This is where Wister's lousy viewpoint comes in: it's really hard to stomach all the ballyhooing over Southern honor and Romanticism. Only Wister's talent as a writer allows him to get away with it.