A Speckled Bird

An orphaned girl of mixed Northern and Southern blood is raised between two worlds in the aftermath of the Civil War, wanted fully by neither. Augusta Evans was among the first American women to make a fortune by her pen, a fierce Confederate who wrote propaganda for the cause and outsold nearly everyone; this late novel is her reckoning with the country the war left behind. Fifty-nine plates of nineteenth-century painting, among them Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt, gather the landscapes, harbors, and home fronts of a divided nation into the world of Evans's Reconstruction novel.