Mary Boykin Chesnut - Infinite Women

Born: 31 March 1823, United States
Died: 22 November 1886
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mary Boykin Miller

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.

Mary Boykin Chesnut’s U.S. Civil War diary was published in 1905, almost twenty years after her death. Offering a “vivid picture of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle,” she described the war from her perspective as an upper-class Southern slaveowner, but her writing encompassed different classes as well. From 1881 to 1884, she worked on a final version to be published, and subsequent versions were published after more of her papers were discovered. Historian C. Vann Woodward’s annotated edition won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982, and it is arguably the most important work by a Confederate author. Yet Johns Hopkins University history professor Kenneth S. Lynn claimed, with no apparent proof, that the diary was a “hoax” and a “fabrication” by a failed novelist in a 1981 New York Times review of Woodward’s edition. He even criticised the New York Review of Books’ reviewer, who responded, “Mary Chesnut’s Civil War is neither fiction nor a fraud. It is a perfectly legitimate reconstruction of first-hand material and will be read not as the work of a novelist—failed or otherwise—but as that of a remarkably penetrating and capacious historian.”