Old Plantation Days: Being Recollections of Southern Life Before the Civil War (Annotated)

Old Plantation Days is a memoir of antebellum Southern life, composed as a sequence of recollections rather than a conventional historical argument. Its prose is intimate, elegiac, and anecdotal, evoking domestic routines, seasonal customs, kinship networks, and the social world of the plantation before the Civil War. Read within its literary context, the book belongs to the postbellum genre of plantation reminiscence, a form shaped by nostalgia and by the cultural work of remembering a vanished order. N. B. De Saussure wrote from within the world she describes: the educated white Southern elite whose fortunes, identities, and assumptions were transformed by war and emancipation. Her perspective is therefore both historically valuable and ideologically revealing. The book preserves details of manners, household life, and regional memory, while also reflecting the limitations and silences of its class, especially regarding enslaved people whose labor sustained the society being recalled. This volume is recommended to readers interested in Southern history, memory studies, women's life-writing, and the literature of the Lost Cause era. It should be read critically, not merely as reminiscence, but as a document of how a defeated society sought to narrate its past.

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