In Search of the Real Mary Chestnut

Mary Chestnut recorded one civil war. Now, nearly a hundred years after her death, she appears to be contributing to another. When Kenneth Lynn attacked C. Vann Woodward's new edition of Chestnut's journals as a "fraud" and a "hoax," scholars seemed temporarily to abandon a longstanding interest in the historical figure behind these remarkable wartime reflections. Instead, attention turned first to this unaccustomed display of public acrimony and then to a new critical scrutiny of the text in question. Now that William R. Taylor, William Styron, Steven M. Stowe, and others have vindicated Woodward's meticulous editing of Mary Chestnut's Civil War, it may at last be possible to look beyond the document that has caused such dispute to the woman and the society that created it. The publication of Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's Mary Boykin Chestnut: A Biography encourages such a focus, for it is the first full-scale treatment of Chestnut's life before and after the dramatic years portrayed in her journal. "And just as the journal illuminates her world for the twentieth-century reader," Muhlenfeld argues, "so her life-compelling and indomitable-informs and illuminates her work" (p. 11).1 Woodward and Muhlenfeld cooperated closely on their projects, and each expresses gratitude and admiration for the other. The senior scholar has written a laudatory preface to Muhlenfeld's biography and declares her aid to have been "indispensable" to his own efforts, while she in turn offers him effusive thanks in her preface. Despite these testimonies to collaboration, the two historians' interpretations of Chestnut are quite different. Muhlenfeld's predominant interest seems to be Chestnut's postwar writings, perhaps because these literary manuscripts make up such a large proportion of her surviving personal papers. Woodward's introduction and editorial notes for