Virginia Vignettes

Mrs. Burton Harrison, also known as Constance Cary Harrison, was a prolific American novelist of the late nineteenth century who came from a prominent Virginia family. As a young woman, she witnessed the destruction of the Civil War and nursed the Confederate wounded in Manassas and Richmond. After the war, Harrison toured Europe, married, and settled in New York. She produced a large body of work, much of it popular serialized fiction and sentimental romance. She is best known for her 1911 autobiography, Recollections Grave and Gay. The book offers a detailed record of the Civil War from the point of view of an intelligent and well-connected woman who had personal contact with many notable figures of her day. In describing the death of her cousin, Randolph Fairfax, at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Harrison combines romanticism with blunt realism: “This youth, handsome and gifted, serious and purposeful beyond his years, the flower of his school and college, in all things worthy the traditions of his warlike ancestry, was killed by a piece of shell entering his brain, as he stood by his gun at sunset under a hot fire from the enemy’s batteries.”

Further Reading:

Mrs. Burton Harrison, Recollections Grave and Gay (1911)

This Vignette Provided By

Adrienne Dunning Rea, English instructor at Pitt and Edgecombe Community Colleges in North Carolina