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    The American Scholar

    Southern Secrets

    Jun 03, 2019 5 minutes
    Review by Nancy Isenberg

    SISTERS AND REBELS: A Struggle for the Soul of America

    BY JACQUELYN DOWD HALL

    Norton, 690 pp., $39.95

    WHY SHOULD WE CARE about three sisters who never achieved lasting fame? Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin are largely unknown today. None of them married a president. They weren’t heiresses of Gilded Age tycoons or stars of the silver screen. Although contemporaries of Amelia Earhart, they did not make headlines by flying off on daring adventures. Their stories were not even tragic in the classical sense—they did not die young.

    But the Lumpkin sisters do matter, because their lives tell a regional tale of southern female identity. Born in the New South during the late 19th century, they were raised in a highly literate family devoted to Lost Cause mythology, which celebrated the Confederacy as a noble defense of a way of life. Although the

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