Margaret Junkin Preston, poet of the Confederacy

"Margaret Junkin Preston (1820-1897) was once deemed by the Washington Post to be "one of the really famous American authors of the day." A prolific author of poetry and fiction, she came to popular acceptance despite masculine disapproval of female writers, especially in the South. In this comprehensive literary biography Stacey Jean Klein maps the progress by which this Pennsylvania native became a celebrated poet of the Confederacy and eventually an established author of national prominence." "Margaret's father, Presbyterian minister Rev. Dr. George Junkin, served in turn as president of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania; Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; and Washington College in Lexington, Virginia - a career path that exposed Margaret and her sister Eleanor to a superior education by faculty tutors and to the cultural values of the East, Midwest, and South. While in Virginia, Eleanor married a math professor from the Virginia Military Institute, Major Thomas J.^

Jackson - later Confederate general "Stonewall" Jackson - in 1853 and died tragically soon after, following childbirth. In 1857 Margaret married Major John T. L. Preston, a Latin and English professor at VMI and a widower with seven children." "Though her poetry and short stories had appeared in several national magazines and her only novel, Silverwood (1856), had been published anonymously prior to her marriage, Preston gave up her writing career in exchange for household duties. But with the onset of war, Preston again took to wielding her pen, this time to espouse the Southern cause through a series of Confederate nationalist verses. The deaths of Stonewall Jackson and her stepson, her husband's dangerous military service, and the invasion of her home by Union troops all solidified for Preston the high personal cost of war and compounded her belief in the justice of the Confederate cause.^

Her most notable piece from this period is a long narrative poem, Beechenbrook: A Rhymeof the War, published in Richmond in 1865." "After the war Preston saw in her writings an opportunity to validate the Lost Cause ethos of the Confederacy and to propose expanded roles for women in reshaping Southern society. It is during this period, Klein notes, that Preston's works advanced in sophistication and captured a wide readership. Preston's poems were often anthologized, and her essays and reviews were published in periodicals in both the North and South. Her subsequent collections of poems and her prose work A Handful of Monographs: Continental and English (1886) all met with wide acclaim and established a place in the literary canon for this poet of the Confederacy."--BOOK JACKET.