Two novels

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, known for her Civil War diaries, also penned two intensely autobiographical novels, previously unpublished. These fictionalized accounts, 'The Captain and the Colonel' and 'Two Years - or The Way We Lived Then,' explore the lives of women in the mid-nineteenth-century South. They delve into subjects like gender roles, slave-mistress relations, childhood, education, westward migration, and the Civil War's impact on private lives, offering a unique extension to her historical observations.