A rather scarce work on the market by an influential Southern / Confederate authoress, Mary Ann Harris Gay [1829-1918]. 

Though she would go on to become one of the most influential female authors of the Reconstruction period, the present is the first edition of her first book, which she sold door-to-door herself. Portions of the present work were lampooned by Twain in Tom Sawyer; he called them "pretended compositions" and compared them to the work of a common school-girl. Perhaps she got better, or perhaps Twain was just being, well, Twain. 

Born in Decatur, Georgia, she was a constant author, but became best known for her pro-Confederacy Civil War memoir Life in Dixie During the War (1892). Hers is one of a small number of book-length Civil War memoirs written by women. Gay was encouraged, along with some other Confederate women writers, to publish her account by United Daughters of the Confederacy (of which Gay was a member) as part of an effort to tell the Confederate perspective on the Civil War. Such memoirs were greatly influential in forming the pervasive “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” myth, which denied the fact that slavery was basic to the Civil War and instead proposed that the Confederacy had fought heroically for political and economic autonomy. Gay’s contribution to the myth of the noble Confederacy was clearly successful, with Margaret Mitchell citing Gay’s memoir specifically as inspiration for passages in Gone with the Wind.

Gay was the granddaughter of Thomas Stevens, a Georgia planter and slaveowner, and grew up in his home with her mother and siblings. John Brown (c.1810 – 1876), who had escaped from slavery on Stevens’ plantation and settled in England, recounted Stevens’ cruel behavior in his memoir A Slave Life in Georgia (1854). After the Civil War, Gay raised money for postwar projects such as the building of a Baptist church in Decatur, which earned her the position of a fundraising agent for the church. She traveled the south for decades, raising money to build Confederate cemeteries and army memorials, and helped establish a chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The poems and prose were dedicated by Gay to "the ladies of Georgia." And they are full of Southern romance, of Southern pastors as beacons of piety, of the Alabama landscape and Tennessee waterfalls, of temperance and religion. Probably best read with a mint julep [virgin for the temperance poem] in hand.

A Georgia Lady [i.e. Mary Ann Harris Gay]. Prose and Poetry. By a Georgia Lady. First Edition. Nashville. Published for the Author. 1858. 199pp.

A fair copy only, bound in cloth, shaken, with moderate foxing, handled pages, blank prelims, and rears removed.Loss to spine as shown.