Search results for ""Author Elswyth Thane""

Williamsburg, Virginia, is once more the scene in this second book of Thane's series, but the time is now the 1860s. Some of the characters are the descendants of those in the first novel, Dawn’s Early Light, and Grandmother Day, who was 16 when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, is now 95. Once, she can remember, it was Massachusetts that was threatening to secede instead of South Carolina. And when she was a girl they never seemed to think much about Yankees, one way or the other. But when a Yankee comes to Williamsburg in the tense autumn of 1860 and red-haired Eden Day falls heels over head in love with him, her great grandmother takes the long view—besides, she likes him herself. The story moves from Williamsburg to Richmond to Washington and back again during the dreadful years between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. In addition to the fictitious characters, Jeb Stuart and General Lee, Pickett, Magruder, and Stonewall Jackson are all seen through the eyes of the men who followed them into battle. Like Dawn’s Early Light, Yankee Stranger is full of action and romance, but most importantly, it presents a vivid re-creation of a vanished world.

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Elswyth Thane is best known for her Williamsburg series, seven novels published between 1943 and 1957 that follow several generations of two families from the American Revolution to World War II. Dawn’s Early Light is the first novel in the series. In it, Colonial Williamsburg comes alive. Thane centers her novel around four major characters: the Aristrocratic St. John Sprague, who becomes George Washington’s aide; Regina Greensleeves, a Virginia beauty spoiled by a season in London; Julian Day, a young schoolmaster who arrives from England on the eve of the war and initially thinks of himself as a Tory; and Tibby Mawes, one of his less fortunate pupils, saddled with an alcoholic father and an indigent mother. But we also see Washington, Jefferson, Lafayette, Greene, Patrick Henry, Francis Marion, and the rest of that brilliant galaxy playing their roles not as historical figures but as men. We see de Kalb’s gallant death under a cavalry charge at Camden. We penetrate to the swamp-encircled camp which was Marion’s stronghold on the Peedee. We watch the cat-and-mouse game between Cornwallis and Lafayette, which ended in Cornwallis’s unlucky stand at Yorktown. Dawn’s Early Light is the human story behind our first war for liberty, and of the men and women loving and laughing through it to the dawn of a better world.

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