A Woman Rice Planter

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This journal of Southern life records a widow’s gallant four-year struggle to make rice-growing pay in post-bellum Carolina. Her style is lucid, her comment sometimes bitter, but her affectionate accounts of field hands’ idiosyncrasies and day-to-day experiences reveal the humor that sustained her. Patience Pennington (in real life, Elizabeth Allston Pringle) was born to wealth; after her husband’s death she bought the rice plantations that form the scene of her story (first published in 1914).