List of Images Series Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Reading Letters, Telling Stories, and Writing History 'Everything Is So Different Here': Changing Cultural Landscapes An Identity in Transit: From 'True Woman' to 'Southern Lady' Familial Relations: North and South Articulating a Southern Self: Georgia, Sunnyside and the Confederacy Reconstructing Southern Womanhood Postscript Notes Bibliography

Sarah Hicks Williams was the northern-born wife of an antebellum slaveholder. Rebecca Fraser traces her journey as she relocates to Clifton Grove, the Williams' slaveholding plantation, presenting her with complex dilemmas as she reconciled her new role as plantation mistress to the gender script she had been raised with in the North.

REBECCA FRASER carried out her doctoral work at the University of Warwick, UK. She is currently a lecturer of American History and Culture in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia.