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Sep. 24th, 2015 03:50 pmI have some conflicted feelings about Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War as history book -- it does a thing where it really wants you to feel like you're reading narrative fiction, so she has a habit of interspersing her actual historical-record scenes with novelistic statements like 'Rose sat across from Adams, surmising his thoughts,' and it doesn't FOOTNOTE things, and then you go to the back and it finally tells you what the sources are for, like, everything on page four, and everything on page five, and so on. And by then it is too late! I wanted to know where Karen Abbott got her source for that thing she stated the woman was feeling while I was reading the page, not once I hit the end and had forgotten everything I was like "??? REALLY? But ... how do you know?" about. I mean, it's quite well-researched overall, and for the most part I believe most of what she's saying, but sometimes she draws analytical conclusions in which I would like SEVERAL more 'perhapses.'
(I also wish that she had set off/distanced her quotes a little more, especially when in dialect, especially when quotes in dialect come from, i.e., a wealthy Southern woman reporting her conversations with her slaves, because there were some cringeworthy moments.)
However, that said, she does achieve her goal, because as pure entertainment, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy is GOLD. Romance! Spyjinks! Secret ciphers! Undercover agents!
Obviously my favorite story was Actual Crossdressing Drama Heroine Emma Edmonds, oh my God, I've never read about anybody whose life
( aligns so exactly with every single trope of romantic cross-dressing fiction. )
My second-favorite was Mary Jane Bowser, former slave and undercover agent in Jefferson Davis' house, reading all his letters and passing information onto the Union through her old boss Elizabeth Van Lew, and getting completely away with it because nobody knows she's literate!
Mary Jane Bowser is not actually one of the four main women written about -- Elizabeth Van Lew is -- but I feel she really should have been. To be fair to Karen Abbott, when we saw her speak last week, she said that if Mary Jane Bowser's diary had not been destroyed in the 1940s (ARCHIVAL TRAGEDY) then significantly more of the book would have been about her, but I don't know how much I want to let Abbott entirely off the hook for framing the narrative so significantly around white women, or at least not without pointing out that it's not like it's an accident that most of the primary sources that allow for the kind of work she's doing were written by white people. But that comes straight back to the historiography questions I was complaining about above, so.
Anyway, Elizabeth Van Lew, abolitionist, quiet spinster lady and mastermind of the Richmond spy ring, is also extremely interesting. And apparently much more effective than her Confederate counterpart, Rose O'Neal Greenhowe, who did a lot of very elaborate spying with ciphers and Morse Code and seducing high-ranking Union officials, but was arrested extremely early on in the war and spent much of the rest of the war in prison, which is rather satisfying given her ragingly racist and pro-slavery sentiments.
The last of the four women that Abbott writes about is Confederate spy Belle Boyd, a teenager whom Abbott at least characterizes as very consciously creating herself into a dramatic heroine. What's most interesting about Belle Boyd, to me, is the sort of freedom in which she operates -- like, there's lots of galloping around solo on horseback carrying messages and wielding weaponry and flirting with everybody she comes across in a way that I would probably view as moderately unrealistic if I came across it in a YA novel. But apparently not! I think? Come on, Karen Abbott, FOOTNOTES!
(I also wish that she had set off/distanced her quotes a little more, especially when in dialect, especially when quotes in dialect come from, i.e., a wealthy Southern woman reporting her conversations with her slaves, because there were some cringeworthy moments.)
However, that said, she does achieve her goal, because as pure entertainment, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy is GOLD. Romance! Spyjinks! Secret ciphers! Undercover agents!
Obviously my favorite story was Actual Crossdressing Drama Heroine Emma Edmonds, oh my God, I've never read about anybody whose life
( aligns so exactly with every single trope of romantic cross-dressing fiction. )My second-favorite was Mary Jane Bowser, former slave and undercover agent in Jefferson Davis' house, reading all his letters and passing information onto the Union through her old boss Elizabeth Van Lew, and getting completely away with it because nobody knows she's literate!
Mary Jane Bowser is not actually one of the four main women written about -- Elizabeth Van Lew is -- but I feel she really should have been. To be fair to Karen Abbott, when we saw her speak last week, she said that if Mary Jane Bowser's diary had not been destroyed in the 1940s (ARCHIVAL TRAGEDY) then significantly more of the book would have been about her, but I don't know how much I want to let Abbott entirely off the hook for framing the narrative so significantly around white women, or at least not without pointing out that it's not like it's an accident that most of the primary sources that allow for the kind of work she's doing were written by white people. But that comes straight back to the historiography questions I was complaining about above, so.
Anyway, Elizabeth Van Lew, abolitionist, quiet spinster lady and mastermind of the Richmond spy ring, is also extremely interesting. And apparently much more effective than her Confederate counterpart, Rose O'Neal Greenhowe, who did a lot of very elaborate spying with ciphers and Morse Code and seducing high-ranking Union officials, but was arrested extremely early on in the war and spent much of the rest of the war in prison, which is rather satisfying given her ragingly racist and pro-slavery sentiments.
The last of the four women that Abbott writes about is Confederate spy Belle Boyd, a teenager whom Abbott at least characterizes as very consciously creating herself into a dramatic heroine. What's most interesting about Belle Boyd, to me, is the sort of freedom in which she operates -- like, there's lots of galloping around solo on horseback carrying messages and wielding weaponry and flirting with everybody she comes across in a way that I would probably view as moderately unrealistic if I came across it in a YA novel. But apparently not! I think? Come on, Karen Abbott, FOOTNOTES!
