Select language, opens an overlay

Quotation

On the books' influence: "With Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' issued among the Waverleys for a variation in setting, if not in theme, an idyll of sentimental feudalism was taken up in the antebellum South as a blueprint and a benediction for a civilization already divided into landed fiefdoms and fully regulated by caste. Out of the novel's high-colored Arthurian cloth was fashioned, in and for the states of the future Confederacy, a self-conscious and elaborately archaizing cult of courtliness (the leading planters even dubbing themselves 'The Chivalry'), complete with tournaments and duels and, above all, a prodigiously exaggerated attachment to the chastity and honor of women, who were reared and cultivated accordingly." --Claudia Roth Pierpont, "A Study in Scarlett," The New Yorker (Aug. 31, 1992), p. 90.