Readers have long struggled with the ramshackle state of Mary Chesnut's literary remains. Her ersatz “diary” composed of material, variously dated, some original, some recollected, and all recomposed after the war, has remained an essential even if vexing resource for those interested in understanding the War between the States from a southern slant. Part of what has remained invaluable about this source, despite its problematic provenance, is its ability to provide what at least seems like a living record of the complex and perplexing ways that slavery functions as both a sore and a salve on southern life and consciousness.

Julia Stern means to set some of these disparities to rights. Known, thanks to Chesnut's posthumus editors and publishers, as a diary, Stern rechristens the narrative an “epic.” Stern uses the concept of epic – in the modern sense – in part to tidy up the mess created by Chesnut's dilettantish refusal to frame her work according to a stable idea of genre. In so doing, Stern highlights Chesnut's efforts as having heroic proportions on the level of both scale and purpose. Anyone who has even just picked up the C. Van Woodward edition will recognize the narrative's girth: it spans 886 pages. But Stern's claim to the term has more to do with the narrative intention – to understand and construct this period of southern history as epic, to give the South its due, and to see it take its rightful place among the heroes of American history. Stern believes – as does Chesnut – that heroes retain their value even when, and sometimes because, tragedies befall them.

Stern is more than qualified for this undertaking. No one, short of Chesnut herself, could exceed her investment in each and every detail depicted and she strives to make sense of these details. At times, perhaps, Stern puts too much stock in the value of a unifying narrative for both her book and Chesnut's. In hewing too closely to a Freudian theory of the unconscious, for instance, Stern sometimes forces readings of Chesnut's text that are both unnecessary for her own thesis and impossible to pin down. Supporting one such interpretive leap as being “far too revealing to be dismissed” (150), not only the historians among us will bristle at this reasoning.

Stern is at her strongest when she is relishing the multifaceted nature of many of the real-life details that Chesnut provides. But her greatest contribution has to be in her patience. Chesnut's archive – both published and unpublished – is labyrinthine and Stern is devoted to its details, tracking down various facts and rooting out fictions that help the reader fully appreciate the gargantuan intellect behind even Chesnut's most incidental musings. Stern spares nothing in her efforts to understand and explore the tangled references that are characteristic of Chesnut and applies the scholar's art to each of them. What the reader gets, as a result, is a compendium of references and ideas that accompany Chesnut through the many visions and revisions that Chesnut's text underwent over time and editions.

Ultimately, readers of Julia Stern's Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic will be glad that the author has a self-confessed “imaginative streak.” Using her sensitivity for language Stern vivifies a vital argument about the importance of genre in understanding Chesnut's brilliant account of her Civil War experiences. In so doing, Stern restores the creative luster to Mary Chesnut's inspired “literary tableaux,” pronouncing them “epic in miniature” for their ability to celebrate the Confederacy while also creating a sophisticated and complex work of art. A pleasure to read for its ingenious interpretation of often overlooked incidents in Chesnut's massive work, the book will delight those who take pleasure in how suggestive and important details were to Chesnut and should be to us.