| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 229 words from this article are provided below; about 451 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Margaret Junkin Preston, Poet of the Confederacy: A Literary Life. By Stacey Jean Klein. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. xviii, 137 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-57003-704-7.)
After receiving scant historical attention in the century after her death, Margaret Junkin Preston is now the beneficiary of two recent biographies. Building on Mary P. Coulling's 1993 study, Margaret Junkin Preston: A Biography, Stacey Jean Klein has added greatly to our understanding of this important nineteenth-century southern woman poet. While Coulling focused on the key personal events in Preston's life, Klein emphasizes Preston's literary career, particularly her efforts to carve out a prominent place for women in the intellectual life of the region.	1
Preston (1820–1897) was born in Pennsylvania but moved south when her irascible proslavery father, George Junkin, accepted a position as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. In the 1850s, having received a substantial education, Preston began publishing poems, short stories, and occasionally translations of foreign literature in the leading periodicals of the time, including the Southern Literary Messenger and Graham's Magazine. Much of her poetry makes for difficult reading today, for like most poems of the period, Preston wrote with a romantic, almost maudlin style. Indeed, Preston's paeans to flowers and waterfalls are all too emblematic of nineteenth-century poetry and help explain why she has attracted few biographers until recently.	. . .

There are about 451 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.