GILCHRIST, Annie Somers

Born 1841, Hardin County, Tennessee; died 2 February 1912, Nashville, Tennessee

Daughter of James and Ann McFarland Somers; married John A.Gilchrist, 1860; children: one son

Annie Somers Gilchrist grew up at "The Oaks," the Somers plantation, near Dresden, Tennessee, and graduated from Mary Sharpe College in Winchester, Tennessee. She lived with her husband in New York until 1865 when they moved to Nashville where he operated a hotel. They had one son. Gilchrist was a member of the South's first woman's club, named in honor of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

Gilchrist's novels depict the emotional life of heroines whose histories are related to the fortunes of their families and changes in circumstances that test and prove character. She believed in an aristocracy of merit, often confirmed by wealth but qualified by Christian charity. Her first major novel, Rosehurst; or, The Step-Daughter (1884), delineates the trauma of a rejected daughter, Marion Lawrence, whose father prefers his son and neglects her for her stepmother. Later Marion misjudges her husband's relationship with his cousin; when he fails to perceive her jealousy, she leaves him for a man who loves her. The husband convinces everyone she is deranged, and Marion, in her flight, does become disoriented. Through the help of an old friend, she recovers her sanity and returns, aged and scarred, to her husband.

Fusing the novel of manners and a psychological study, Gilchrist writes with acumen. Fascinated by the costumes and "consummate masks" of society, she knows the stratagems by which people preserve the appearance of propriety and morality. She views those pretensions and appearances in conflict with the true heart: better insanity than adultery. And she evokes both the longing and "voiceless anguish" of a daughter who cannot become a woman—even with a husband whose enduring love should outweigh his momentary obtuseness—or live unscathed by years of parental rejection.

Katherine Somerville; or, The Southland Before and After the Civil War (1906) is probably autobiographical. The subjects indicated in the title are not effectively joined. Perhaps the point of the novel is that zest went out of life in the South after the war; it is more likely that Gilchrist refused to come to grips with the large subjects at war within herself: a slavocracy in which life was good for her, and her aspirations for success in a society that denied the realities of racism to which she could not have been blind. She permits one young Southerner in her first novel, Rosehurst, to argue that the South should have been defeated; no one speaks for him in Katherine Somerville.

The Night-Rider's Daughter (1910) is a novel of social protest. The main characters are ten-year-old Gracie Gaylor and her parents, decent, common people who become victims of ruthless economic change and uneven justice in backwoods Samburg County, Tennessee. Developers deprive them and their neighbors of access to the lake where they fish for a livelihood; their lawyers betray them for bribes of land; the outraged fishermen organize as night riders to counterattack. The father learns of the destructive plans for the attack and withdraws, but is wrongfully imprisoned, and the mother, worn down by work, fear, and hopelessness, dies. Going to see her father, who has contracted a fever in prison, Gracie finds him chained to a hospital bed; the chain is removed only on the morning of his death.

The impact of these events on Gracie, the resourcefulness of which she is capable, the pluck and resilience that helps her endure sorrows she cannot comprehend are depicted with restraint. Gilchrist transforms what might have been a tearjerking tale into the characterization of a child whose admirable bearing is a measure of the worth of a devastated family. This poignant minor novel, in which people talk like people who deserve to be heard, is a testament to a mature author and woman.

—ELIZABETH PHILLIPS