Genteel Rebel: The Life of Mary Greenhow Lee

Abstract

Genteel Rebel is an extensively documented biography of Mary Greenhow Lee, a socially prominent widow living in Winchester, Virginia, during the Civil War. Lee's name may not be familiar to many readers, and, indeed, her life bears few of the exceptional qualities that usually merit a biography. Yet, according to Sheila R. Phipps, Lee's experience is valuable as a “window into the world” of the Civil War era (p. 10). Phipps sees in Lee's life a larger tension common to elite, white southern women in the mid-nineteenth century: she was both “genteel” and a “rebel.” Lee's gentility was evident in her “connexion,” Lee's term for her network of socially equal family and friends, as well as in her propensity to be “visitable,” which Phipps defines as having a “strong family heritage, a good education, piety, and an easy familiarity with the social graces” (p. 2). Lee was born in Richmond, Virginia, where her father, Robert, held a number of public offices, including mayor. She spent her early adulthood in Williamsburg, Virginia, as well as in Washington, D.C., where she socialized with many prominent political figures, such as Dolley Madison. Her marriage to Hugh Holmes Lee, a lawyer and distant cousin, prompted her move to Winchester in 1843, and she remained there after his death in 1856.