Prologue & Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

"Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady" by Florence King is a memoir about King's years with her grandmother who attempts to rear her as a Southern lady. King is academically gifted in her youth, and much of her story details her struggle to balance her education with the behavior expected of a lady. "Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady" is an extremely entertaining and, at times, comical relation of King's formative years which details the influences that created King as a woman and a writer.

In the Prologue, ladies enjoy a generic recognition only in the South, and one must study the Southern woman in order to understand the American woman whose successful rearing results in that "perfection of femininity known as a lady" (pg. 1.) The narrator and author, Florence King, was reared as she was raised in the...