Mary Maillard: 4 books

The antebellum letters in the Skinner Family Papers – housed in the University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill – were written primarily by Tristrim Lowther Skinner; his sister, Penelope; his father, Joseph Blount Skinner; and his sweetheart, Eliza Fisk Harwood....

In these vividly written letters we follow Tristrim Lowther Skinner of Edenton, North Carolina, from the age of thirteen in boarding schools in North Carolina and Philadelphia, through two years at the College of William and Mary where he studied under the brightest minds of the South, to his practical...

Penelope Skinner’s letters paint an unusually clear and vivid portrait of the lives of elite young women of the Upper South in the late 1830s. The term, on the carpet, meant, “under consideration or discussion,” and, in Penelope’s world, it specifically referred to a belle’s status as unattached...

After the Twelfth Night Party in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1841 – thirteen years old and brimming with hopeful exuberance – Eliza Fisk Harwood wrote her close friend, “Trim” Skinner of Edenton, North Carolina, that she had danced so long she wore holes into her new satin shoes and hose. Their...