Grace King was a Southern writer whose career was set in the aftermath of the American Civil War. She has been described by Robert Bush as "an accomplished realist in the French tradition" as well as "the first important historian among Southern women." Her historical writings are still lively and readable accounts of early Louisiana life, and her fiction continues to be valuable because it provides a view of the Southern woman as she began to shed a passive role and to struggle for a more active one, and because it promotes an understanding of the sufferings of the South during Reconstruction, a subject largely ignored by better-known authors. Typically, the setting of her fiction is Reconstruction New Orleans, and the main character is a woman who not only has lost her worldly goods and position in life but also must do without the support of the men...