$16.95

Winner of the 2007 John Esten Cooke Fiction Award
Finalist for Best Books of 2006, Foreword Magazine

Devotion re-creates the life of Varina Anne (Winnie) Davis, the youngest child of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Winnie was not quite a year old when the family fled the Rebel stronghold of Richmond as the Civil War was ending. Twenty-one years later, Winnie was catapulted into a celebrity she did not seek. As the officially proclaimed Daughter of the Confederacy, she was presented with great fanfare at large conventions of Confederate veterans from Texas to Virginia. In the late nineteenth century, Winnie Davis was known here and abroad as a foremost cultural symbol of the South's Lost Cause.

Yet she was also a cosmopolitan, intellectual "New Woman" who earned a living as a journalist and novelist and traveled with the Joseph Pulitzers. Winnie's adoring followers often misread her steadfast love for her father as unconditional support of the failed Confederacy and the Old South's nostalgic ideals of womanhood. Julia Oliver explores these contradictions from several angles. Winnie speaks from the pages of her journal. Other narrators include Winnie's close friend Kate Pulitzer; her sister, Maggie Hayes; and the love of her life, Alfred Wilkinson, the grandson of a famous abolitionist.

From the portrayals of Winnie's romance, her relationships with her parents, her illness and depression, and her ambivalent role as torchbearer for the Lost Cause emerges a young woman whose conflicted existence reflects the tenor of the country following the Civil War and its aftermath. An intimate saga about a remarkable, star-crossed family, Devotion poignantly measures the massive weight of memory on individuals caught up in the sweep of history.

Julia Oliver lives in Montgomery, Alabama. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Seventeen Times as High as the Moon, and the novels Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky and Music of Falling Water.

September 2008

ISBN 0820332046 paper • $16.95

“A sharp, endearing account of a woman who was well-educated and sensitive to the ironies of the Reconstruction era. . . . Oliver's sure hand is evident on every page of this slim, lyrical novel”—Hal Jacobs, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Oliver is at her best in creating a psychological portrait of the Davis family, traumatized by its drastic changes of fortune. . . . She certainly proves that Davis, whose life began too late and ended too early, was singularly qualified as the ambassador of a lost cause.”—Publishers Weekly

"Wow ... an extraordinary, compelling tour de force—wise, hard-nosed, and not the least bejasmined or fraught with Confederate or Victorian nostalgia. In the circus this is called working without a net. Oliver gets things right by getting Winnie’s voice right, right from the beginning, and then getting all the rest.”—Philip D. Beidler, First Draft

"Recommended . . . Will appeal to those who like their historical fiction served up in the style of the day. . . . Oliver's novel is carefully researched and boasts an extensive bibliography, so the imagined life carefully tracks the genuine one."—Library Journal

"Oliver offers a serious exploration of American and southern femininity at the end of the Nineteenth Century. . . . The enigmatic first line suggests the way the novel will explore dreams and memory and the way they merge with the more exotic category of premonition. Oliver's use of premonition as a motivating force in Winnie's consciousness is allusive of the gothic and illustrates its importance to Southern American literature. The strangeness of identity in a world ravaged by war and decay, its big houses haunted by the memories of the past, are themes suggestive of Poe and Faulkner. . . . A well-researched novel, Oliver's Devotion offers a history that is rarely told despite the immense fascination with Civil War history and suggests a compelling version of the Davis family—surprisingly progressive and intellectually well-connected."—Keya Kraft, Foreword Magazine

"Julia Oliver seems the perfect author to capture the ethereal nature of Winnie Davis—once a living legacy, a complex and talented woman almost eclipsed by her family and burdened with more history than she could bear. This novel about her is long overdue."—Ruth Ann Coski, Library Manager, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia

"By using a chorus of narrators, Julia Oliver brings to life the sometimes dysfunctional Jefferson Davis family, especially his surprisingly modern daughter Winnie, peeling away their public images to reveal each personal story in this fascinating novel."—Doris Betts, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English (Emerita), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"This well-researched novel offers much detail of the era and profiles of historic personages."—Kirkus Reviews

"The story brings the human element to each member of the [Jefferson] Davis family."—Mississippi Press

"A fascinating examination of one of history's most interesting, yet little known figures."—Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser

"Oliver delivers in this fascinating historical fiction account of Winnie Davis . . . This sweeping tale of a star-crossed family is indeed one for the ages."—Jim Fraiser, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal