A Woman Rice Planter

xiii, 450 pp. Four pages of publisher ads follow text. Olive green boards with gilt titles, top edge gilt. Pseudonymous collection of writings from New York Sun column by plantation owner Elizabeth Waties Allston Pringle (she owned Chicora Wood and White House, both in Georgetown County, South Carolina). Introduction by Owen Wister. Illustrated by Alice R.H. Smith. A Woman Rice Planter offers insights into a broad spectrum of Southern life after the Civil War. As an account of a woman's struggle for survival and dignity in a distinctly male-dominated society, it contributes significantly to women's history. It presents a rich portrait of a distinctive place―the South Carolina Low Country―in a troubled and generally undocumented time, a portrait made all the more vivid by the fine pen-and-ink sketches of Charleston artist Alice R. Huger Smith. Elizabeth Alston Pringle was the daughter of Robert Francis Withers Allston, a state legislator and governor, who was at one time owner of seven plantations but bankrupt at the time of his death. Left to struggle for income to regain the property and position the family held prior to the war, Pringle turned to writing and eventually published a column on Southern culture in the New York Sun under the pseudeonym Patience Pennington. In 1913 she collected and reshaped these newspaper columns and compiled them into one volume, A Woman Rice Planter, a best-selling book that reduced her financial worries. Her descriptions of the vagaries of rice planting, of her relationships with former slaves and the first generation of free-born African Americans, and of her life in the early Reconstruction period are important to our understanding of the prevailing attitudes and persistence of the Old South in the New.