robert e lee

From the 1880s until WW1, Virginia authors dominated publication on the subject of the Civil War. Thus, the Virginia version of the Cause and of Lee was transmitted by writers such as Thomas Nelson Page, Robert E. lee, Jr., Francis Hopkinson Smith, Robert Stiels, Constance Cary Harrison, Philip A. Bruce, and Sara Pryor. Lee and his biography began to act as a symbol for the Lost Cause in the South. The Lee story was picked …

…understanding in doing so. In the excellent novel, For the Love of Robert E. Lee, Harper creates a seventeen year old South Carolina girl who, in the 1960s, falls in love with Lee. Garnet falls in love with her understanding of Lee as a person, but at the novel's end, from which this passage is taken, she has changed her interest to Lee as icon. She explicitly states the differing southern and national icons. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------