A Sisters’ World: Reasons of the South and Domestic Whispers in Grace King’s Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters

Abstract

Grace King documented the American Civil War from the Southern perspective of the losers, in times in which the Northern press urged her to embrace the winners’ ideology. As she witnessed the decline of the French colonial project in post-bellum Louisiana, her writing task was to preserve the Frenchified vernacular and the exquisite Creole traditions from oblivion. Her tales and memoirs from New Orleans’ history convey the tenacity of former mistresses and colored servants in mutual defense of their refined domestic order and family bonds disrupted by the brotherly fight.

Keywords

• American Civil War. Creole culture and interethnic relations in Louisiana. Grace King. Patois. Southern memoirs