Reading Reconstruction

Among southern novelists writing during Reconstruction, few rivaled Sherwood Bonner for flamboyance, talent, and unconventional behavior. Growing up as Katharine Sherwood Bonner in a prosperous Holly Springs, Mississippi, family, she married at age twenty-two. Two years later, in 1873, she left her husband in Texas and her young child in Mississippi to further her education in Boston. With her salary as a secretary and help from such luminaries as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, she used the pen name Sherwood Bonner to publish travel accounts and short stories, many featuring southern characters and regional dialect. While relatively successful with a novel, Like unto Like, published in 1878, Bonner fell ill from cancer and died at age thirty-four in 1883. Perhaps because modern readers can consult an excellent account of Bonner's life, Hubert H. McAlexander's The Prodigal Daughter (1981), Kathryn B. McKee of the University of Mississippi has chosen a different approach. Instead of following a chronology, McKee situates Bonner in the Reconstruction South to produce new interpretations of the author's most important writings. McKee finds that “in her unstable plots, laced with dark humor, [Bonner] embodies the anxieties of one age that set the stage for the next” (p. 13). Much of the first chapter of Reading Reconstruction will be familiar to historians of this era, as the author discusses the political, social, and constitutional events that occurred in Holly Springs and the nation

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• Reading Reconstruction

  Michelle-Taylor Sherwin•Women s Studies•2021

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