Blood & Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937. By Sarah E. Gardner. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. x, 341 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-8078-2818-1.)

Abstract

Over the course of the last thirty years, several historians have sought to make sense of the lost cause—a regional mythology created by white southerners to interpret Confederate defeat and describe their ideal of the pre—Civil War South. Few have sought to examine the ways in which this regional narrative became the national story of the war. Sarah E. Gardner's Blood & Irony, therefore, is a welcome addition to this literature, as it seeks to make that connection through an examination of southern white women's narratives of the war. Gardner takes a chronological approach to her subject, beginning with narratives, both published and unpublished, written in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and examines the trajectory of white women's fictionalized accounts of the period through 1937 with the publication of the best known of all Civil War novels, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Through their war stories, Gardner argues, southern white women “created a new cultural identity for the postbellum South” (p. 11).