Celia Garth: A Story of Charleston in the Revolution

320 pp. "Celia Garth is a story about a girl who wanted things to happen to her. Celia lived in Charleston, South Carolina during the American Revolution. She had blond hair and brown eyes and a sassy face, and she worked in a fashionable dressmaking shop. Things did happen to Celia, but not as she had planned. The king's army captured Charleston. The ravisher Tarleton swept through the Carolina countryside in a wave of blood and fire and debauchery. Caught up in the ruin were Celia and her friends -- the merry-minded Darren; Jimmy, whose love for Celia brought her into his tragedy; the fascinating Vivian, five times married; Godfrey, rich and powerful, who met disaster because he could control anything in town but the weather; the gay daredevil Luke. Most people thought the Revolution was lost. Many Americans, like Celia's handsome cousin Roy, joined the king's side. Then out of the swamps appeared Francis Marion. Marion was a little man. Marion was also crippled. But as Luke said of him, "When that man's leading a charge, he looks nine feet tall." In the dressmaking shop, Celia became a spy for Marion. She sewed, she smiled sweetly, and in secret she risked her life sending information to this man that the king's whole army could not catch, the mighty little man to whom Tarleton angrily gave the name "Swamp Fox." Every book by Gwen Bristow has been a best seller: Jubilee Trail, Tomorrow Is Forever, This Side of Glory, The Handsome Road, Deep Summer. They have been translated into numerous foreign languages. Her readers run into millions. In Celia Garth, as in the others, the people, the places, and the events are as vivid as if you saw them yesterday. The book is alive. It may well be her greatest."