Age itself is no guarantee of wisdom, of course. But I know that I could not have wrestled this novel to the ground when I was 25, 40, or even 55. This is not to say that the book is autobiographical in the traditional sense. Far from it, for what I wrote is a historical novel set during the American Civil War. My characters’ circumstances could not be more different from my own, but they often reflect emotions that I was able to write about only because I had lived through them myself. These emotions give the book its truth—hard-won in the seven-plus decades of my own life, reimagined in the lives of the fictional characters.

I was a confused and lonely fourteen-year-old in June 1967 when I took a train from my home in Raleigh to visit my grandmother in a small South Carolina town, where I was to write another relative’s wedding-gift thank-you notes. Believe it or not, this bride’s refusal to write her own notes was a source of discord and great embarrassment to other family members. So my grandmother was going to pay me a hundred dollars to write the notes. This was a heck of a lot of money to a fourteen-year-old.

Grandmother lived in a big house and employed people of color who cooked and took care of her, the house, and the surrounding garden that occupied a whole city block. She and her chauffeur picked me up from the crossroads where the train paused for a few minutes to disgorge a few passengers. As the train slowed and stopped with a big chuffing exhale, I saw my grandmother out the window. She stood by the tracks grimacing against the train’s dirty breeze, holding onto her hat with her palm pressed to the top of her head. My joy at seeing her was mixed with dread.  

For the task at hand, Grandmother had bought some thick cream-colored notecards and a fountain pen with a little handle on the side that, if pulled out, would allow me to refill the pen with thick black ink from a glass inkwell. I learned the hard way that when I set the pen to paper, the ink often came out of the nib faster than I anticipated. Grandmother soon took custody of the inkwell because she was afraid I would spill it. This was probably a good thing; it was permanent ink.

Each morning I sat at a desk and wrote a few of the notes, referring to a handwritten list the recipient had kept of gifts and givers. Beside me, an open French door admitted soft clammy air. There was no air conditioning, and soon my hands grew damp and clumsy as I wrote with the fancy pen. Often my grandmother didn’t like what I produced and would make me redo a note, especially if the ink blotted or if I used words that she did not think were sufficiently dignified. She was used to having her way and I was not, but still there were disagreements. I remember one argument over my use of the word “handy,” referring to the practicality of a particular gift. Grandmother thought it crude. I flounced, pouted—and redid the note.

An oil painting of a thin man whose long white beard made him look like George Bernard Shaw hung on the wall across the room. Behind me hung a painting of a small, quiet-looking old woman dressed in black except for a white lace cap that tied in a large bow under her chin. Her hands folded over a book in her lap, she looked like Emily Dickinson might have, had the poet lived into true old age. She was the mother of the man across the room. Most of the recipients of the notes were descended from these two people. As was I.

Once in a while I stuck out my tongue at my grandmother when her back was turned; and for good measure, I did the same to the people in the two portraits.

My friend in that house was a woman named Cortez Dundy. I should have been calling her Mrs. Dundy, but this was the 1960s and I called her Cortez. She cooked for Grandmother and helped take care of the house, and she’d been a constant in my short life. Real love cannot be faked, especially when the recipient is a lonely child, and Cortez loved me much more than I deserved. On this visit, she was somehow able to affirm my feeling that my grandmother could be very difficult, without saying a single disrespectful word.

Cortez listened to me when I complained: about my grandmother, the heat, the difficult fountain pen, the slow progress down the list of notes. She listened when I said I didn’t like the old man and the old woman in the portraits peering down at me while I sat at the desk. She didn’t say it was disrespectful for me to say I was tired of the story Grandmother told so often, of how the old man had fought in the Civil War, came home with a bum leg, but still built the businesses that provided the big house and padded life that my grandmother now lived. The life that I shared—but Cortez didn’t. There must have been cauldrons of anger and resentment underneath the calm exterior Cortez always presented. But she didn’t say anything except yes it was hot, and yes those were a lot of notes to write with a strange and clumsy pen and permanent ink.

In hindsight I can articulate my feelings: resentment, loneliness, the relief of being listened to and accepted even though I was ungrateful and obnoxious; the dawning awareness of Cortez’s different reality. These feelings are reflected in my novel in the early life of Susannah, the main character, and in her relationship with her friend Letty, a formerly enslaved woman.

In the late 1990s, I was a single mother in my forties, with three daughters in middle and high school. My children, before and after adolescence, were and are delightful. Those adolescent years were a shock, though, as every mother can understand. Overnight, instead of being a cheerful, companionable presence in the house, each of these young ladies suddenly wanted nothing to do with me. I was the object of disdain: old, ridiculous, clueless. Moreover, my daughters’ sudden physical maturity combined with their innocence of the world was a horrifying mixture.

Adolescence is a time of grief for both parents and children. New boundaries and the shifting of emotional ties are necessary and essential things. The shock for me was in seeing that for now, my children were not going to be my companions. They were not going to care about my problems. My job was not to be their friend, but to protect them, even if they hated me for it. As much as safety allowed, I had to let them be themselves, though that usually meant they wanted no part of me.

  Our experience overall was mild. The police never came to our house; all three girls finished high school, and then college. And each of them, in her turn, came back around to thinking that I am capable of saying something worthwhile now and again. Occasionally something leaks out from those years that I never knew about—a piece of mischief, an accident, a brush with disaster—things that I’m now glad that I was not told of at the time. I know that I am unfathomably fortunate.

In hindsight, my feelings: a ball of grief from being rejected by beloved offspring; a mother’s loneliness in doing what is best for a child despite being hated for it; a mother’s terror in realizing that in the end, she would not be able to save her child, that she cannot trade her life for her child’s; and then rising above it all, gratitude for my children’s lives, and for mine. These feelings provided my foundation as I envisioned, and then wrote, Susannah’s relationship with her son Francis.

In October 2015 I drove from Raleigh to Chattanooga to attend a reenactment of the Civil War battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. I was then 62 years old and had been working on my novel off and on for about two years. I was discouraged; my critical inner voice and its best friend—writer’s block—were winning my own private war.

The search for inspiration had led me to this place. To prepare, I’d bought a period dress and rented a cabin near the enactment site. I had also purchased a ticket to the ball planned for the evening after the battles.

I soon saw that it was a mistake to believe that the reenactment would inspire me—and solitude on top of uncertainty was, in this case, a terrible combination.

Since the actual battlefield grounds are now mostly covered with homes, the reenactment took place on land some miles away from Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. If my own characters were flimsy and unreal to me at this point, the reenactors seemed even more so. The soldiers ran around on a large grassy field and pretended to shoot each other. Some of them would lie down for a little while and then get back up and rejoin the fight. A few cannons and horses were on the higher ground; white tents and small campfires were at the edges of the field or sprinkled among the trees beyond. Puffs of smoke from rifles and cannons drifted overhead. It was picturesque but not realistic. There were many more soldiers in gray uniforms than blue ones, and I wondered if, with such overwhelming numbers, the Confederates would “win” the battles this time.

The spectators sat in aluminum bleachers, and everyone seemed to know each other. Two people dressed as Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd were teased with comments like, “Hey, get that damned Yankee outta here,” and “Where’s John Wilkes Booth when you need him?” I wondered how these people would react if I told them that Abe Lincoln was one of my personal heroes.

We watched the proceedings with great solemnity. Some people had binoculars. Although lots of the women wore 1860s dresses, I still felt foolish in mine. The battle was hard to follow, and I only knew it was over when spectators began drifting away. I supposed that the Federals had been declared the winners, but “Abe Lincoln” did not display any exultation, nor were the Confederate boosters chagrined, and so I wasn’t sure. In a photo someone took of me then, it’s surprising how cheerful and normal I look.

The only thing that seemed worse than going to the dance that evening was the thought of not going, after driving all the way there and paying good money. Sure enough, I was a wallflower until I asked a boy of about twelve to dance. He was wearing a Confederate uniform and cap, and the two of us made our way through the moves of the Virginia Reel without conversation or eye contact. I was sick with awkwardness.

As soon as possible after that, I left the ball and, in the chill of the early evening, walked back to the cabin. I opened the manuscript on my computer. My book was about an 1860s woman who lives in South Carolina but does not believe in slavery and so she quarrels with her Confederate son. All day I had been surrounded by those who, unlike me, still seemed to side with the Confederate son. This was nothing short of horrifying. And what’s more, my novel now seemed as unrealistic as the reenactment I had witnessed. I was certain that I could never finish it.

There was still another whole day before I would be returning home. The next morning I went to the commemorative museum atop Lookout Mountain and studied everything over and over. I looked down from Point Park at the beautiful timeless curves of the Tennessee River and the city of Chattanooga. I descended and walked the streets of the old part of town and found the site where Union General George Thomas had his headquarters.

Back in my cabin, I sat for a long time and looked at my manuscript. I thought of my great-grandfather whose leg was shattered here. I read over some of the favorite parts of my story, thought of his mother, and pulled out the little memoir she had written of her journey to find him. I thought about the bravery and modesty of this woman. She had saved the life of her son, but his story had always received more attention than hers.

I thought of the portraits in the big house in South Carolina, portraits that are now in other houses, the houses of people who received the notes that I wrote. I thought of the impossibility of telling my version of this story, a version completely different from the choices and lives of the actual people, but one that holds true to the vein of iron in the mother who for so many years I only knew as an old lady in a white lace cap who stared down from an oil painting. My audacity in writing such a revisionist story overwhelmed me. I, who had not even been able to write the thank-you notes without blotting and ruining so many of them. I cried out, a miserable sound.

In hindsight, my feelings: the isolation of being an outsider in a tight-knit community; inadequacy; overwhelming futility and despair. You will find these emotions in the book in Susannah’s long-held feelings of isolation, and in every episode of the obstacles she faces.

By the time of the Chattanooga visit, the losses in my life had begun to accumulate—the sort of rending losses that afflict all of humanity. My divorce twenty years before had been the loss of a dream, the loss of my young self. I had lost my beloved father in 2011 after watching him suffer greatly for several years. In 2016 I lost my equally beloved mother, who had descended into dementia after our father died; I have always thought that this was because it was easier for her to forget everything than to live without her husband of nearly 65 years.

Then in 2024, while I was still finishing revisions to the novel, my sister died of cancer. What I suffered during the year before her death was nothing compared to her own physical and emotional distress; but to watch what was happening to her was unspeakable. The savage side effects of cancer treatments, the indignities of disruption to the body’s natural processes, the hopes regularly dangled and then thwarted, as though she were caught in the paddle wheel of some punishing machine. When she died, she took with her our shared memories of childhood, of Cortez and our grandmother, of so many things large and small that we had faced together.

Each of these losses bestowed a different layer and quality of grief on the middle and final years of writing my book. All of them were cruel, necessary, and purifying, for they burned away the unimportant things. With each, I understood more fully what remained, and I was able to share that knowledge with my character Susannah.

Love, transcendent and eternal, found its way onto my pages. The only thing left standing in the end.

Measure of Devotion

by Nell Joslin

  "An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel." — Kirkus Reviews It is the Civil War, Susannah Shelburne, age 36, is living in South Carolina. Although she and her husband oppose the Southern cause, their only child Francis is a Confederate soldier. When Francis is wounded in Tennessee, Susannah leaves home to find him. Under her care his condition improves, but he soon becomes a prisoner of war, and Susannah strikes a wrenching personal bargain in exchange for his parole. Soon, though, news from South Carolina makes it clear that returning home is impossible, and Francis’s worsening mental state necessitates a high-stakes escape plan.

There is a wildness hidden beneath Susannah’s demure façade, leading her into unconventional, courageous decisions that put her at odds with her husband, her son and her community. Adversity also brings her more fully into the realities of the people of color in her life. Measure of Devotion’s themes—political differences among families and communities, the urgent need for transracial understanding, a woman’s existential search for control of her own life—are the persistent issues of our national consciousness. “Measure of Devotion is a debut novel that is bound to enter the canon of classic Civil War literature. That it's told from a woman’s viewpoint makes it unique.” — Hungry for Good Books Available from Regal House Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookseller. For more, go to measureofdevotion.com

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