An unusual phase of southern life and one totally unfamiliar to most northern readers is pictured by Patience Pennington in A Woman Rice Planter. They are the experiences of Mrs. Patience Pennington, a typical Southern woman, who tells her story with great modesty and much charm. The book is an informal description, in diary form, of the writers experiences in managing a large rice plantation in South Carolina.

This South Carolina lady actually managed two large rice plantations on her own account. This required so much resource, energy, tact, patience, and executive ability that the story of its achievement is amazing, more—it shows a most unusual combination of rugged courage with womanly sympathy and religious devotion to duty. The volume is illustrated with quaint woodcuts.

lts literary value is in its picture of what Owen Wister, who writes the introduction, calls “the highly accentuated characteristics" of the rice-plantation coast of South Carolina, and in a story of really heroic effort. The writer, daughter of an ex-Governor of South Carolina, invests all her slender funds in the family plantation of Cherokee, and with the uncertain aid of hands and renters, and in the face of many natural obstacles, successfully manages the huge enterprise. Her dangers, her ventures, the patience exhausting performances of the farm hands, her interest in the growth of the crops and in the animals which are her only real companions, are related in simple and vivid diary form.

Not heavy tomes of sociological exposition could give so vital a picture of Southern life and problems. The courage of the book is notable. Her hands would get into debt, and neither cajolery nor threats could move them to payment; hired to plough by the acre, they would turn up just a sufficient number of furrows to cover the ground with an appearance of fresh earth; they would row for miles to steal her harvested rice by night; they would do nothing by directions, and nothing right; their communal morality was of the most primitive, distorted kind; and yet she always feels hopefully that in keeping their cabins erect, their burying grounds clean, their rice-fields green, their sons out of the urban gulf, her indomitable efforts are their own reward. Under her hand some of the unsophisticated hands become friends well worth her and the reader’s attention. Without deep resources of description or narrative talent, her faithfulness to detail and her enthusiasm in her work have made a book of genuine historical value to the South.

“Patience Pennington’s” veracious narrative, in the form of letters and diary jottings, was originally printed by the New York “Sun” in order to give outsiders some conception of the struggles of a Southern woman, who, alone and unaided, has attempted to manage the irresponsible farm hands on two large South Carolina rice plantations under post-bellum conditions. By means of this series of pathetic and humorous anecdotes woven into philosophical and religious meditations with consummate skill, the author has accomplished her purposes.

The pictures which the author gives of Southern life are charming—the days out of doors enjoying the beauty of the woods and fields and sky, the long drives with funny little “ Dab sitting up behind, the perilous crossing of the flatboat ferry with the spirited horses, the long rows across the river to visit a neighbor, the days of planting and harvesting in the fields directing the picturesque workers—all are vivid and interesting. The illustrations have, for the most part, the real charm of the South, and are Millet-like in their characterization of peasant life.