"Genteel Rebel" by Sheila Phipps. Paperback.

This elegantly written biography depicts the effects of social structure, character, and national crisis on a woman’s life. Mary Greenhow Lee (1819–1907) was raised in a privileged Virginia household. As a young woman, she flirted with President Van Buren’s son, drank tea with Dolley Madison, and frolicked in bedsheets through the streets of Washington with her sister-in-law, future Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow. As a Confederate sympathizer in the hotly contested small border town of Winchester, VA, she ran an underground postal service, hid contraband under her nieces’ dresses, abetted the Rebel cause, and was eventually banished.

Lee’s personal history is an intriguing account of the complex social relations that characterized nineteenth-century life. She was an elite southern woman who knew the rules but often flouted them. She had strong ideas about who was (or was not) her “equal,” yet she married a man of quite modest means. Lee’s biography also enlarges our view of Confederate patriotism, revealing a war within a war and divisions arising as much from politics and geography as from issues of slavery and class.