What do you think?
Rate this book
Carolina Chronicles - Chronological Order #12
Queen's Gift
This is the seventh novel in Inglis Fletcher's celebrated Carolina series, and the keystone volume in her large design to compass in story the 200 years history of North Carolina from first settlement to ratification of the Constitution. The year is 1788 and Albemarle folk who have been united in war are divided in peace. A Constitution has been shaped in Philadelphia. Friend stands against friend in the bitter dissension over whether North Carolina shall ratify it and join the new union of the states. Leaders like brilliant, farsighted James Iredell and staunch Governor Sam Johnston use all their eloquence and prestige to persuade fellow citizens of the advantage in strong central government. As in 'Raleigh's Eden,' the principal characters are Adam and Mary Rutledge. Mary's strong conviction that the Constitution will safeguard all she holds dear. . . is opposed to Adam's belief that the new plan of government ignores the rights of men. His vote at the Hillsborough convention could estrange him from Mary.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1952
69 people want to read
About the author
Inglis Fletcher
42 books30 followersInglis Clark Fletcher was widely traveled, but the home of her maternal ancestors—coastal North Carolina—provided the stuff of her successful fiction and the home of her later years. The eldest of three children, Fletcher grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois, a small town populated by many displaced Southerners. As a child she preferred reading, debating, and writing novels to other pastimes, but it was her drawing talent that sent her to study as a teenager at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. Fletcher displayed some aptitude, but frankly said she was more interested in marriage than sculpture.
Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.
The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.
The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.
This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.
-Source: www.Novelguide.com
Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.
The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.
The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.
This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.
-Source: www.Novelguide.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 20, 2018
Loved the series
December 7, 2015
An enjoyable trip to the early years of our country. At first I was worried that it was early politics and while politics did play a role there was plenty more. North Carolina insisting on a bill of rights before ratifying. Plantation life and interesting people of the small town of Edenton. A touch of romance and danger and why not throw in a hurricane. I would love to get more books from this series. #HIstoricalfiction#NorthCarolina#plantationlife#BillofRights
Read
October 19, 2009Queen's gift by Inglis Fletcher (1952), [1st ed.]
September 1, 2010
Plantation life in Carolinas.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews