Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World

Abstract

her fiction. An actual cousin to the progenitor of plantation fiction, Thomas Nelson Page, Rives coveted his approval and eventually found her writing mentioned in the same company as his. Memorable is Rives’s use of an image made in 1889 to telegraph her privilege. In the photograph, Rives reclines on a well-appointed sofa while over her stands a Black woman in a domestic uniform, her eyes downcast to Rives’s figure, her posture inclined as though ready to spring at the wishes of the recumbent figure. Censer’s caption labels the image as one expressly taken to show “how Amélie Rives portrayed herself as a Virginia aristocrat” (p. 171). Whether Rives and her publicist consciously engineered such a linkage or periodicals manufactured these opportunities, “the effect was the same: Rives was pictured as a benevolent southerner of the old school” (p. 170). Rives thus illustrates the troublesome “benevolence” of progressive white womanhood, eager to explode the boundaries of circumscribed femininity, unwilling to disentangle those same freedoms from the net of whiteness. Censer finds Rives’s better formulated work later in her career when she relies less heavily on tired formulas of regional exceptionalism. InWorld’s-End (1914), she explores the toll of premarital pregnancy, for instance, and Shadows of Flames (1915) takes up opiate addiction. Here and earlier Censer maintains that Rives focused “on the passion, insouciance, and capabilities of her female protagonists” (p. 260). Rives emerged as something of a mentor to younger southern writers and enjoyed a friendship with fellow Virginian Ellen Glasgow, who famously exposed the treacheries of what she called “evasive idealism” in novels including The Sheltered Life (1932). Censer’s study may not so much engender a new generation of Rives devotees as it may instead redirect readers to how southern literature evolved in concert with a national literary marketplace. For her own part, Rives was chronically dissatisfied with her literary efforts, admitting in 1932 to a biographer she forcefully discouraged “I haven’t any illusions about myself as to my writing” (p. 251). If Rives had reservations about her own skill, readers will have none about Censer’s. The Princess of Albemarle is the fullest portrait of Rives’s life and work to date; it opens a window onto a period of American letters in which writing from the South seems simultaneously out of step with national rhythms and revelatory of their deepest impulses.