Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All  (1989) is a novel by American author Allan Gurganus. Framed as the story told by 99-year-old Lucy Marsden to an unnamed visitor, the novel offers a fanciful history of the American South, weaving Lucy’s own story with that of her husband, William, a Confederate veteran, and his former slave, Castalia. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for eight months and won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1994, it was adapted as a television miniseries of the same name for CBS.

The novel begins with an epigraph from William Dean Howells: “What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”

Lucy Marsden, aged 99, receives a visitor at the Lane’s End Rest Home in Falls, North Carolina. Born in 1885, she was the child bride of “Captain Willie” Marsden. Fifty years old at the time of their marriage, William had enlisted to fight for the Confederacy when he was 13, and he lived to become a minor celebrity as the oldest living veteran of the Civil War. Lucy, who suffered abuse at the hands of her traumatized husband, describes herself as the “veteran of the veteran.”



Lucy’s narrative jumps around in time, and she adopts the voice of several of her characters, including William’s. She begins her narrative with her husband’s death, recalling how, during the last 30 years of his life, he was a media figure. People came to interview and photograph him, and Lucy would prod him to tell his war stories. Throughout the book, she recounts these stories in William’s voice, culminating in the surrender at Appomattox.

Lucy also tells William’s personal story. As a boy of 13, William marched off to war hand-in-hand with his friend Ned Smythe. Handsome, blond Ned, blessed with a sweet disposition and a sweeter singing voice, was beloved by all—he even sang for Robert E. Lee—but he was most beloved by William. During a lakeside battle in Virginia, a Yankee sniper shoots Ned. “Poor Willie Marsden, cowlicks a mess, seed packet of freckles, red-rimmed eyes, and a nose running unchecked (heir to sixty-one slaves!), he walked around numb for weeks.”

William never recovers from Ned’s death, and his trauma is compounded by the things he witnesses—and does—during the War, as he climbs the ranks to Captain.



William is 50 when Lucy first meets him. She is just 15 and has no way of knowing that her husband-to-be is so emotionally damaged. On their wedding night, his abusive temperament combines with repressive ideas about female sexuality to disastrous effect. As he becomes more abusive, Lucy remains loyal: “I still believed I could rescue the boy in him.”

Part of this rescue involves learning (and part imagining) William’s own mother, Lady More Marsden. Lucy recounts Lady Marsden’s fear as Sherman’s army approached her plantation. Eventually, Lady Marsden, humiliated by soldiers and freed slaves, is left to watch her house burn down.

Lucy remains dedicated to her husband, as he grows not only increasingly abusive but also increasingly irrational. Even as she gives birth to nine children (and William endangers their lives), she tries to rescue her husband. He becomes obsessed with acquiring weapons, selling the family’s property to pay for them. On an ill-advised hunting trip, he accidentally blinds one of their sons. Throughout, he attacks Lucy with venom, blaming her for their misfortunes.



Over time, Lucy’s yearning for freedom matures into a proto-feminism: “Males are frailer and shorter-lived and overly talented at the pride that depresses.” Her sense of her own oppression is sharpened as she forms a close friendship with Castalia, or Cassie, a former slave on the Marsden plantation.

Lucy recounts that when she first arrived at the Marsden house as a girl, she was afraid of the old black woman but curious about her life. She lived alone in a place she called Baby Africa, where she established a mink farm. Over the years, she has collected enough mink pelts to make herself a fur coat.

For irrational reasons, William fires Cassie. In sympathy, Lucy reaches out and their friendship begins. Perhaps in retaliation, William destroys Cassie’s beloved fur coat.



Lucy tells Cassie’s story in Cassie’s own voice, as she imagines Cassie told it to her former mistress, Lady Marsden. Cassie claims to have been an African queen, who sought the advice of an outcast witch about the advent of slave traders. The witch, Reba, explains: “We bout to fill that deep white maw what's felt real empty way too long…We the very nourishment-answering earth they lack so bad.” Cassie recounts her capture, her suffering on the Middle Passage, and her arrival at the Marsden plantation.

By the end of the novel, it’s clear to the reader that Lucy has only one way to win the freedom she has been longing for. William—senile and weak—attacks her one too many times, and Lucy retaliates, killing the old man.