Firmly in the second camp is Anne-May, who inherited the Peeler plantation from her elderly Aunt Tandy Rose, flouting her late aunt’s testamentary directive to free Peeler’s slaves. Jemma’s family is enslaved on the Peeler tobacco plantation in the border state of Maryland, where the White population seems equally divided between Union and Rebel sympathies. Despite her proven ability, she’s often replaced at battlefield hospitals by incompetent, drunken male nurses. Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female medical school graduate, and strives to batter down prejudice not just against women doctors, but women nurses.
Georgy, from New York, one of seven daughters of the abolitionist Woolsey family, is determined to become a nurse. Kelly’s ambitious tale begs to be called “sweeping,” but its chief virtue is the way it homes in on the microcosms, some horrific, inhabited by its three narrators. A saga of the Civil War gathers all the usual suspects-enslaved people, slave owners, abolitionists, soldiers, and nurses-but the result is far from clichéd.
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