Best Companions

Almost 400 letters between mother and daughter draw the reader into the antebellum Southern aristocracy. The Middleton family lived on one of the largest, most opulent plantations in South Carolina. These papers moldered in a family member's file cabinet until Harrison (ed.. Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas C. Pope), a Middleton descendant, uncovered them; she now offers them as part of USC's invaluable Women's Diaries and Letters of the South series. The letters begin in 1839, just after Eliza Middleton Fisher's marriage. Eliza writes to her mother, "Tell me everything when you write," and mother obliges. We learn the vicissitudes of daily life, from the weather to the wardrobes. We read about young Eliza's travels to mountains and to Monticello, and we get a little celebrity gossip, as when Eliza visits dramatist and soon-to-be-abolitionist Fanny Kemble. The letters afford a fascinating glimpse of the cultural life of antebellum America, as we track what Eliza read (for example, the moral tract Woman's Mission) and the operas she attended. We also follow her foibles as she learns the arts of housekeeping. But the letters are not devoted solely to the frippery of society talk. The women also talk politics Eliza, for example, voices interest in "the Texas question" (the possible annexation of Texas, and the "disastrous" possibilities for the South). This volume is a major achievement, not least because Harrison makes public a trove of documents heretofore unseen by anyone but the Middletons.