ISBN 1-929490-32-5
Softcover
544 pages
6 x 9 1/4"
27 black-and-white illustrations
genealogical charts, chronology
bibliography, index
$24.95
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Mary Telfair
The Life and Legacy
of a Nineteenth-Century Woman
by Charles J. Johnson, Jr.
Charles Johnson’s magnificent biography of
Mary Telfair is a detailed examination of the life of a most remarkable woman.
Born in 1791, Mary Telfair grew up in Savannah, Georgia, where she was the
daughter of a wealthy merchant-planter and three-term governor of Georgia.
Although reared in the South, she bore no kinship to the plantation mistress
living in isolation—alienated by paternalism and male domination. Rather she
belonged to an elite circle of urban Southerners who felt as much at home in the
drawing rooms of Philadelphia and New York as in the parlors of Charleston and
Savannah.
As Johnson writes, "Mary Telfair was her own woman, but she
affirmed her identity within the framework of good manners, decorum, and taste
demanded of women of her station." Many
of the country’s leading figures passed through the lives of the Telfairs, and
the Telfairs were related to, or close friends with, most of the prominent
families in Savannah and the Georgia upcountry—relationships fully explored in
this work. Johnson’s legal training played a significant role in enabling him
to unravel the climactic event in Mary Telfair’s story—the great Telfair will
contest, one of the epic legal battles of the nineteenth century.
Drawing on a
stunning amount of research, Charles Johnson reveals the choices and originality
of a woman of vision. The result is an unforgettable portrait—a "must-read" for
anyone interested in nineteenth-century Southern history and women’s studies.
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Raised
in Darien, Connecticut, Charles Johnson graduated from Yale University
and the Harvard Law School before practicing securities law in New York City for
thirty-two years. He also is the author of Corporate Finance and the Securities
Laws. In 1988 Johnson moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he and his wife
collect tribal, Southwestern, and contemporary art. |