Dora Darling: The Daughter of the Regiment
by Jane Goodwin Austin (published anonymously in this edition)

Boston: J.E. Tilton and Company, 1865. 5 x 7 1/8 inches. 370 pp. Author is anonymous in this edition. Rear end paper missing. B&W illustrations. Brown cloth hardcover with gilt lettering to spine. Binding is solid; it looks like it was rebound at one point because the end papers look more modern. The tissue guard for title page is missing. The first few pages have a large damp stain. Pages are bright with toning at edges and frequent soiling and damp stains. This is a “juvenile” (young adult) Civil War novel about a young girl who engages directly in the war. Culturally and historically significant. Rare. Includes Black vernacular dialogue.

The novel is “a charming and lively read, and it is also fairly progressive. Austin utilizes the disruptive backdrop of the Civil War as a means to reimagine and transgress norms of gender, age, and class, while simultaneously denouncing slavery and prescribing a formula for post-war reconciliation. Dora, a strong female heroine, challenges gendered notions of feminine weakness and need for protection, even as she reinscribes traditional roles of females as nurturers and caregivers.” (Source: a 2015 doctoral dissertation by Kari Holloway Miller)

Austin wrote 24 novels and many short stories during her lifetime and was a friend and peer of Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.