Marion Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life

Overview

FROM the time when, as a mere baby, I dreamed myself to slumber every night by "making up stories," down to the present hour, every human life with which I have been associated, or of which I had any intimate knowledge, has been to me a living story. All interest me in some measure. Many enlist my sympathy and fascinate the imagination as no tale that is avowedly fictitious has ever bewitched me.
I hold and believe for certain that if I could draw aside the veil of conventional reserve from the daily thinking, feeling, and living of my most commonplace acquaintance, and read these from "Preface" to "Finis," I should rate the wildest dream of the novelist as tame by comparison.
My children tell me, laughingly, that I "turn everything into a story." In my heart I know that the romances are all ready-made and laid to my hand.
In the pages that follow this word of explanation I have essayed no dramatic effects or artistic "situations." "The Story of My Long Life" tells itself as one friend might talk to another as the two sit in the confidential firelight on a winter evening. The idea of reviewing that life upon paper first came to me with the consciousness - which was almost a shock - that, of all the authors still on active professional duty in our country, I am the only one whose memory runs back to the stage of national history that preceded the Civil War by a quarter-century. I, alone, am left to tell, of my own knowledge and experience, what the Old South was in deed and in truth. Other and far abler pens than mine have portrayed scenes of those days with skill I cannot emulate. But theirs is hearsay evidence - second-hand testimony as truly as if they wrote of Shakespeare's haps and mishaps in the grammar-school at Stratford-on-Avon, or of Master George Herbert's early love affairs.
True, the fathers told it to the generation following, and the generation has been faithful to the traditions committed to it. What I have to say in the aforesaid gossip over the confidential fire is of what I saw and heard and did - and was in that hoary Long Ago.
Throughout the telling I have kept the personal touch. The story is autobiography - not history. I began it for my children, whose importunities for tales of the olden - and now forever gone - "times" have been taken up by the least grandchild.
It was my lot to know the Old South in her prime, and to see her downfall. Mine to witness the throes that racked her during four black and bitter years. Mine to watch the dawn of a new and vigorous life and the full glory of a restored Union. I shall tell of nothing that my eyes did not see, and depict neither tragedy nor comedy in which I was not cast for a part.
Mine is a story for the table and arm-chair under the reading-lamp in the living-room, and not for the library shelves. To the family and to those who make and keep the home do I commit it.

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