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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Foes," Mary Johnston skillfully weaves a tale of conflict and reconciliation set against the backdrop of the American Civil War. This historical novel explores the intricacies of human relationships entangled in the turmoil of war, showcasing Johnston's distinctive narrative style that blends vivid imagery with poignant dialogue. As characters navigate the complexities of loyalty and betrayal, Johnston illuminates broader themes of morality and redemption, reflecting the turbulent social landscape of her time and deepening our understanding of the personal toll of conflict. Mary Johnston, a prominent American author of the early 20th century, was deeply influenced by her own experiences in Virginia, a state divided by the Civil War. A fervent advocate for women's rights and a skilled storyteller, Johnston used her literary talent to address contemporary issues, arguing for a more compassionate society. Her nuanced portrayals of characters'—both antagonists and protagonists'—reflect her keen insight into the human psyche, compelling readers to consider the shades of gray rather than stark dichotomies of good and evil. "Foes" is a profound exploration of the human condition during one of America's most tumultuous periods. Readers interested in historical fiction, character-driven narratives, and the moral complexities of war will find in Johnston's work a powerful reflection on the challenge of reconciling personal beliefs with the harsh realities of an era defined by strife. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Foes
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its core, Foes considers how opposition hardens boundaries while revealing the human truths that might yet soften them. Mary Johnston builds her narrative around the pressures that arise when people define themselves against one another, tracing how pride, fear, and conviction can both sustain and endanger a community. Without tipping into summary, one can say the book treats conflict not merely as clash but as a crucible, a place where motives are clarified and values tested. The result is a study in moral weather: shifting, charged, and always attentive to what confrontation does to hearts as well as to histories.
Foes is a novel by Mary Johnston, an American author widely recognized for her contributions to early twentieth-century historical fiction. Appearing in that same early-twentieth-century context, the book reflects a moment when readers sought narratives that weighed individual conscience against the demands of society. Johnston’s reputation for disciplined research and clear storytelling gives the work an air of authenticity and gravity, even when it keeps a careful distance from overt didacticism. While the particularities of setting are best discovered on the page, the novel’s atmosphere evokes eras in which custom, honor, and public duty exert strong claims, inviting the reader into a world shaped by inherited codes.
The premise turns on adversaries whose lives, through chance and circumstance, can no longer remain apart. The story’s opening positions its principal figures on opposing sides of a divide—a matter of allegiance, interest, or belief—and then compels sustained contact that neither sought. From there, the narrative follows the pressures that accumulate: choices that appear simple but prove costly, gestures that seem minor but alter trajectories, and confrontations that illuminate more than they settle. The novel offers the experience of watching conflict move from the abstract to the intimate, as public differences entangle with private needs and as stated principles encounter the unruly facts of lived experience.
Readers can expect a measured, lucid voice and a keen sense of moral and social texture. Johnston’s prose balances incident with introspection, giving weight to interior debate without neglecting the outward stakes of action. Scenes proceed with steady pacing and an eye for the telling detail—a gesture, a pause, a turn of phrase—that reveals more than exposition could. The mood is serious but not dour, dignified without stiffness, attentive to ambiguity without surrendering clarity. This composure allows the novel to sustain tension not only in what happens next, but in how characters come to understand what has already happened to them and what it means.
Themes of duty and desire, loyalty and conscience, order and change thread through the book, asking where responsibility ends and selfhood begins. Foes treats enmity as a social fact and a psychological condition, exploring the costs of belonging to a side as well as the price of stepping beyond it. It probes distinctions between strength and rigidity, courage and recklessness, justice and punishment. The narrative also pays attention to the ways power circulates—through institutions, custom, and personal charisma—and how those currents shape intimate decisions. In doing so, it raises enduring questions about what we owe to others when certainty falters and when empathy threatens established lines.
Although rooted in its author’s era, the novel’s concerns remain pressing. In a time marked by polarization, it offers a rigorous meditation on how we name our enemies and what that naming permits—or prevents. Johnston’s handling of conflict encourages reflection on listening, restraint, and the hazards of victory that leaves nothing to live with afterward. The book’s emphasis on character rather than spectacle invites readers to consider the daily, incremental ways people either entrench hostility or make room for understanding. Those qualities make Foes pertinent not only as literature of its period, but as a lens for thinking about contemporary public and private rifts.
For readers seeking a thoughtful, character-driven exploration of conflict, Foes offers both immersion and inquiry. It rewards patient attention with layered motives, lucid structure, and a tone that trusts the reader to weigh competing claims. The novel’s restraint—eschewing sensational revelation in favor of cumulative insight—makes its moments of emotional clarity all the more resonant. As an entry point to Mary Johnston’s broader achievement, it shows how disciplined craft and ethical curiosity can turn a familiar situation—opponents forced into proximity—into a sustained examination of what counts as courage. In the end, the book promises engagement that lingers beyond its final page.
Synopsis
Mary Johnston’s Foes opens in a colonial province on the edge of upheaval, where two long-established households hold neighboring lands and a history of grievance. The book introduces a young planter-soldier and a woman of independent judgment, each shaped by their families’ pride and obligations. Public occasions—courthouse days, fairs, and musters—place the adversarial lines in view, while private encounters reveal the cost of inherited distrust. Early chapters sketch everyday rhythms of plantation, town, and road, setting a measured pace that lets tensions gather. The title signals more than personal antagonists: the atmosphere itself feels charged with approaching conflict and divided loyalties.
A dispute over boundaries and influence becomes the first clear spark, moving from rumor to deposition, from drawing room to court green. Elders rehearse old slights, while younger voices question the wisdom of prolonging strife. A challenge is nearly issued and narrowly set aside, framing honor as both imperative and trap. Johnston situates the quarrel within social rituals—visiting, churchgoing, electioneering—so that private ill will and public posture interlace. The protagonists, though wary, recognize capability and restraint in one another. By closing this early movement on unresolved tension rather than a clash, the narrative positions the feud as a thread that will tighten with larger events.
Broader currents begin to sweep the province: petitions, committees, and talk of rights and authority. The book shifts from parlor debates to crossroads meetings as neighbors choose positions, some out of conviction, others from necessity. The two houses align differently, recasting the private feud into a political emblem. Lines of friendship and commerce redraw under pressure, with supply, militia service, and allegiance entwined. Through letters, assemblies, and hurried journeys, the protagonists confront the widening scope of their world, measuring personal duty against communal demand. The narrative emphasizes the practical mechanics of mobilization and restraint, showing how a public cause absorbs local enmities without erasing them.
A confrontation at a county seat serves as a first turning point, with tempers high, authority challenged, and the possibility of violence checked by a few decisive actors. The incident produces consequences: a summons for one, suspicion for another, and a cautious repositioning by both households. The woman takes on expanded responsibilities at home, balancing resources amid uncertainty, while the man undertakes a discreet errand that tests judgment rather than force. Johnston uses the road, the river landing, and the tavern as waystations where messages change hands and loyalties are read. Momentum builds as private caution yields to public necessity, yet the feud remains a constant undertow.
Midway through, the narrative broadens to the estates and dependents who bear the weight of disruption. Weather, scarcity, and rumor press hard, and small crises—flooded fields, an illness, a lost shipment—become measures of leadership. A fire or accident brings adversaries into proximity, compelling practical cooperation without reconciliation. The book registers class gradations and the presence of the enslaved, noting how war talk touches work, family, and risk differently across the community. The protagonists act within constraints of custom and law, their choices revealing steadiness more than bravado. By emphasizing management and care, Johnston anchors the larger conflict in the stewardship of homes and livelihoods.
A second turning point centers on restraint and captivity: an arrest, a detainment, or a compelled oath that tests endurance rather than arms. Interrogations are formal, the pressure quiet but cumulative. The narrative tightens to rooms, corridors, and guarded thresholds, where words and silences matter. Assistance arrives indirectly—through a letter, a legal maneuver, an intermediary—keeping action plausible and contained. The episode neither absolves nor condemns; it clarifies. On release or exchange, positions have hardened around the feud, yet knowledge gained during confinement subtly alters expectations. The protagonists reenter a world more vigilant, mindful that events now proceed on a larger stage and a firmer timetable.
Travel and rumor carry news of engagements beyond the county, and the book relays them through messengers, newspapers, and returning companies. Camps, ferries, and fords supply texture rather than spectacle, with emphasis on logistics, scarcity, and time. Brief encounters with public figures are observed without embellishment, anchoring the fiction in a recognizable historical frame. A report of a major encounter elsewhere shifts local calculations, prompting fresh musters and reassignments. The protagonists cross paths amid this movement, their exchanges measured, their obligations immediately pressing. The narrative keeps outcomes offstage, focusing instead on how distant decisions ripple through farms, courts, and roads, and how private rancor adapts to public strain.
The late chapters return attention to home ground, where seasons mark change as reliably as proclamations do. The dispute that opened the book reappears under altered conditions, now entangled with wartime losses and pragmatism. A negotiation—over land, debt, or passage—requires the adversaries to articulate terms plainly. Gestures of civility, once symbolic, acquire practical weight: a gate left open, a share of stores, a signed acknowledgment. Johnston refrains from spectacle, concluding set pieces with quiet choices that carry forward. The thread of possible reconciliation is present but not certain, presented as work rather than sentiment. By avoiding finality, the narrative preserves tension while shifting tone from contest to settlement.
Across its course, Foes presents enmity as inheritance, habit, and sometimes necessity, set against the pressures of community and change. Without prescribing outcomes, the book’s structure suggests that courage may be steadiness, that honor may be patience, and that victory in public can coexist with private loss. Its central message is that conflict, once widened, rearranges every lesser quarrel, yet local duty and humane regard can survive within it. By following the story in measured stages—from grievance to mobilization, restraint, and negotiation—Johnston offers a clear picture of lives aligned to principle and place. The final note is one of possibility, withheld from certainty.
Historical Context
Mary Johnston’s Foes is situated in Virginia during the era of the American Revolution, when the Tidewater plantations, the Chesapeake ports, and the interior valleys formed a strategic corridor between British power and Patriot resistance. The political center shifted from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1780, and military pressure mounted along rivers like the James and York. Social worlds of planters, yeoman farmers, enslaved laborers, and artisans intersected with transatlantic imperial policy and war. Johnston, a Virginian by birth, uses locale-specific detail—county courts, parish life, militia musters, and port commerce—to root the conflict in everyday spaces where allegiance, identity, and survival were tested by the upheaval of 1775 to 1781.
Between 1765 and 1775 Virginia became a crucible of resistance. Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Resolves (1765) asserted colonial rights within the House of Burgesses, while the Townshend Acts (1767) and Tea Act (1773) deepened opposition. After the Coercive Acts (1774), extralegal Virginia Conventions met, with the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond hearing Henry’s Liberty or death speech on 23 March 1775. The April 1775 Gunpowder Incident in Williamsburg pitted Governor Dunmore against militia. Foes mirrors this political escalation by portraying county elites, dissenting artisans, and militia officers as they shift from petitioning to mobilization, dramatizing the stakes of loyalty before formal war.
Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) against Shawnee and Mingo forces culminated at Point Pleasant on 10 October 1774, revealing Virginia’s frontier militarization on the eve of revolution. In 1775, Dunmore issued his proclamation (7 November) promising freedom to enslaved people who joined the British, forming the Ethiopian Regiment. The Battle of Great Bridge (9 December 1775) expelled royal power from the interior; Norfolk burned on 1 January 1776, and Dunmore departed by August. Foes engages these flashpoints to depict how imperial, frontier, and slavery questions intertwined: neighbors became adversaries, enslaved people weighed perilous bids for liberty, and county militias evolved into instruments of revolutionary sovereignty.
The 1781 Virginia campaign and the Siege of Yorktown form the decisive military arc that reshaped the Atlantic world. After British successes in the South—Charleston’s fall (May 1780), Camden (August 1780)—forces under Benedict Arnold raided Richmond on 5 January 1781, torching public stores and private warehouses. General Charles Cornwallis pushed into Virginia in spring 1781, attempting to sever Patriot supply lines and crush resistance. Marquis de Lafayette’s light infantry shadowed him, avoiding pitched battle while preserving the army. George Washington and Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau executed a strategic deception, feinting toward New York and then force-marching south. The French West Indies fleet under Admiral de Grasse sailed to the Chesapeake and won the Battle of the Chesapeake on 5 September 1781, defeating Admiral Thomas Graves and sealing the bay. Allied troops—roughly 16,000 Franco-American soldiers—invested Yorktown from 28 September, with American and French engineers driving parallel trenches, mounting siege artillery, and storming redoubts 9 and 10 on 14 October, led by Alexander Hamilton and Comte de Deux-Ponts. Cornwallis, with about 8,000 to 9,000 men, found his naval escape barred, his outer works collapsed, and his countermines suppressed. On 19 October 1781 he surrendered, sending Brigadier General Charles O’Hara to present the garrison. The capitulation shocked London, triggering parliamentary inquiries and ministerial change by March 1782. Foes uses these Virginia spaces—the James-York peninsula, trench lines, supply depots, and farmland under requisition—to show the material mechanics of victory and the social costs borne by civilians. Johnston’s close attention to officers, militia, enslaved laborers forced into logistics, and French allies underscores how multinational cooperation and local endurance converged to end major combat.
Civil strife between Loyalists and Patriots intensified in Virginia through confiscation acts and loyalty oaths (notably 1777), splitting households and counties. British protection certificates and Patriot committees of safety forced binary choices. Enslaved people confronted agonizing decisions, with some joining British lines under Dunmore or later Cornwallis, while others seized disruptions to flee inland or to maroon communities like those in the Great Dismal Swamp. Foes reflects these fracture lines by tracing family and neighborly ruptures, mapping how ideology, fear, and opportunity recast kin into adversaries, and highlighting the moral complexity of allegiance when liberty for some coexisted with bondage for many.
Virginia’s frontier and backcountry shaped Revolutionary logistics and tactics. Riflemen from the Shenandoah and beyond, including units led by Daniel Morgan, earned repute from the war’s outset and later at Cowpens (17 January 1781) in South Carolina. Earlier confrontations like Point Pleasant (1774) and ongoing pressures along the Allegheny frontier informed militia culture, fort construction, and supply routes over the Blue Ridge. The Great Wagon Road channeled migration and musters. Foes invokes this rugged theater to show a geography of dispersed farms, stockaded posts, and long supply lines, where Indigenous polities, settler militias, and Continental forces contested space even as the coastal campaign reached its climax.
The Virginia home front confronted inflation, specie scarcity, and requisitioning as tobacco exports contracted under blockade. In 1780 the state moved its capital from Williamsburg to Richmond for security, only to face Arnold’s raid in January 1781 that burned public buildings and private stores. Quartermasters pressed enslaved and free labor into wagon trains, and county courts mediated levies and shortages. Women managed plantations, artisanal shops, and relief networks as men served in militia tours. Foes uses these pressures—currency collapse, supply impressment, and dispersed households—to render the civilian burdens of war, aligning private sacrifice with public purpose while noting profiteering and administrative strain.
As a social and political critique, the book exposes the contradictions of a revolution waged for rights amid entrenched slavery and stark class hierarchy. By staging confrontations between planters, middling farmers, artisans, Loyalists, and the enslaved, it interrogates who benefits from liberty and who bears its costs. The depiction of impressment, inflation, and confiscation reveals state power’s reach into daily life. Scenes of enslaved flight and military labor critique racial bondage as the conflict’s unresolved core. Finally, the portrayal of divided communities and opportunistic leadership questions triumphal narratives, suggesting that victory at Yorktown did not resolve the era’s most enduring injustices.
