On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon

Summary

Like America in the mid-nineteenth century, Emma Garnet Tate is a woman at war with herself. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grows up increasingly aware that her family's prosperity is inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. She secedes from the control of her overbearing father to marry Quincy Lowell, a distinguished Boston man, and when war destroys the happy home they have created, Emma Garnet works alongside Quincy in the treatment of wounded soldiers. As she assists him, she comes to see the war as a "conflict perpetrated by rich men and fought by poor boys against hungry women and babies." After Appomattox, Emma Garnet sets out to take the exhausted Quincy home to Boston, where she begins the journey of her own reconstruction.

©1998 Kaye Gibbons, All Rights Reserved (P)1998 Simon & Schuster Inc., All Rights Reserved