About this item
Northern sympathizer in the Confederate capital, daring spymaster, postwar politician Elizabeth Van Lew was one of the most remarkable figures in American history, a woman who defied the conventions of the nineteenth-century South. In Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, historian Elizabeth Varon provides a gripping, richly researched account of the woman who led what one historian called the most productive espionage operation of the Civil War. Under the nose of the Confederate government, Van Lew ran a spy ring that gathered intelligence, hampered the Southern war effort, and helped scores of Union soldiers to escape from Richmond prisons. Varon describes a woman who was very much a product of her time and place, yet continually took controversial stands--from her early efforts to free her familys slaves, to her daring wartime activities and beyond.
About the Author
ELIZABETH R. VARON is Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. Varon grew up in northern Virginia. She received her MA from Swarthmore College and PhD from Yale, and has held teaching positions at Wellesley College and Temple University. A specialist in the Civil War era and 19th-century South, Varon is the author of We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (1998) ; Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (2003) , which won the Lillian Smith Prize of the Southern Regional Council, the People's Choice Award of the Library of Virginia, and the Richard Slatten Biography Prize of the Virginia Historical Society; and Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (2008) and Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (2013) . Appomattox won the 2014 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction, and the 2014 Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize for Civil War History (Austin Civil War Roundtable) , was finalist for the 2014 Jefferson Davis Award (Museum of the Confederacy) , and was named one of Civil War Monitor's Best Books of 2014. Varon's public presentations include book talks at the Lincoln Bicentennial in Springfield; and at Gettysburg's Civil War Institute; and on C-Span's Book TV. She is also a featured speaker in the Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Lectureship program.
