“A Virginia Girl in the Civil War”

Myrta Lockett Avary was born in Halifax, Virginia December 7, 1857, and was educated in her native state. From her earliest years, she showed promising literary talent. During the War Between the States, two of her brothers served under Robert E. Lee. The siblings were descended from Thomas Marshall, fa-ther of Chief Justice Marshall.

Upon her marriage to Dr. James Corbin Avary (of Atlanta, Georgia) she moved to New York City. Here, she served as edi-tor on several prominent magazines. Her loyalty to and interest in the South led her to collect and edit the memories of a Southern woman and her husband, who had been a Confeder-ate officer, and the result is this book, published in 1903.
Strictly speaking, her work cannot be called a novel; it is composed of true stories. Yet it abounds in many of those ele-ments without which a novel would be a failure. It is alive with incidents that follow in sequence and it throbs with the anguish of war and thrills with the joy of loving its heroes.

The resilient, gentle, child-woman heroine, who tells her own heart story and the story of the war from its beginning, paints in striking contrast the springtime and redolence of her love for her soldier-hero husband and the dramatic incidents of the war in which he participated. This book is a classic and a “must-read” for those seeking eyewitness accounts of the war experience for women and the home front. One of the most exciting sequences is when our subject and heroine, Nell, decides to run the blockade in order to get materials needed to fashion her husband a new uniform.