Madaline: Love and Survival in Antebellum New Orleans by Dell Upton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is not at all well known but fascinated me when I ran across it, in the course of doing research for a novel about New Orleans. It is the published journal of a woman who lived in the city in the years after she was ruined by marrying a man who already had a wife, unbeknownst to her. She realizes that she is lost to polite society and makes a compromise that she finds liveable: she becomes the mistress of a married man who buys a house for her. She sets about living in her house and creating a life for herself. Gardening, attending church, hearing sermons in which women who live as she does are condemned, but nevertheless continuing to attend church because her beliefs were important to her. Her journaling is readable and moving for its revelation of her quiet courage. She realizes that she has compromised herself but understands that she has little other option. Her love for her protector is marred by his eventual lack of interest. When he breaks off their relationship and attempts to reclaim the house, she sues him to prove that the house was given to her as a gift, wins her lawsuit, and eventually leaves New Orleans to live in California. The whole story is poignant, and her strength of character quietly underlies the diary entries. I give the book four stars because of the importance of this woman’s story. She is a kind of woman who is not often represented in the fiction of the time except in terms of her destruction, her fall. Madaline never accepts that her morality is identifiable with the ostracism which she suffers. Neither does she pretend that she is perfect, or create a victim of herself. She is a study in strength and resilience.