I expected to see the real Southern mansions of the novelists, with enormous piazzas and Corinthian pillars and beautiful avenues; and the white-washed cabins of the negroes in the middle distance; and the planter, in a white linen suit and a wide sraw hat, sitting on the piazza drinking mint juleps. Well, I don’t really think I expected the planter, but I did hope for the house. Nothing of the kind. All I saw was a moderate-sized square house, with piazzas and a flat roof, all sadly in need of paint. Now, I’m like Betsey Prig; ‘I don’t believe there’s no sich person.’ It’s a myth, like the good old Southern cooking (p. 56).

Oh, they do exist . . .There are houses in Charleston and Beaufort and on the Lower Mississippi that suggest the novels; but, on the whole, I think the novelists have played us false. We expect to find the ruins of luxury and splendor and all that sort of thing in the South; put in point of fact there was very little luxury about Southern life. (p. 56).

conventions of other local color fiction filled with romance and strange people in a unique setting, it was hardened with dialect that often required explanatory footnotes to lead readers through the jungles of apostrophes and phonetic approximations. It was Alice’s first use of extensive dialect transcriptions, and it revealed not only her attempts at realism but also the perseverance and tolerance that magazine writers and editors could expect from their readers (pp. 93-94).

It was twenty-five years ago, and M. Tremblay would marry me, but I was a fool, I:  my heart was set on a young man of this parish, tall, strong, handsome.  I quarreled with all my relations, I married him, M’sieu’.  Within a month of our wedding day he broke my arm, twisting it to hurt me.  He was the devil.  Twice, but for his brother, he would have killed me. (Madame Guion to Maurice, p. 19)

But I thought that I understood the situation better.  I believed Madame Guion told us the truth:  she was only seeking her daughter’s happiness.  She had an intense but narrow nature, and her life of toil, hard and busy thought it was, being also lonely and quiet, rather helped than hindered brooding over her sorrows.  Her mind was of the true peasant type, the ideas came slowly and were tenacious of grip.  Love had been ruin to her.  It meant heartbreak, bodily anguish, the torture of impotent anger, and the bitterest humiliation.(Maurice, p. 23)

"But while French did indeed hold and espouse many conservative views, this narrow characterization of her life and writing omits too much. . . . Significantly, none of these readings match what we might expect a 'conservative' writer to write about. That the names Alice French and Jane Crawford have also begun to appear in gay and lesbian histories and chronologies and anthologies of gay and lesbian literature likewise suggests more to her writing than previously thought" (p. 141). 

I also send that little story I read so long ago to you. . .Do you remember it? Mr. Sanders wanted something for this Saturday's Gazette, so I finished up that. It is very stupid, I know, but it was written for the popular taste, which is also stupid.
--Alice French to Anna Dawes, February 4, 1871

In America the author Alice French, who wrote under the name Octave Thanet, and Jane Crawford, her companion of almost half a century, also had a relationship in which the energies of both went into the career of one. Octave, who for thirty years was among the highest paid writers in the United States, also came to literature as a business--and her success in it was due at least in part to the nurturing support that Jane gave her.