"Born near Guntersville, Alabama, Catherine (Cassie) Fennell was nineteen when the Civil War began. Starting with her time at a female academy in Washington, DC, the diaries continue through the war's end and discuss civilian experiences in Alabama and the Tennessee Valley. Fennell was fairly well off and highly educated, moving easily in very elite social circles. Most of her relatives were staunch Confederates, and the war took its toll, with multiple members of her family killed or captured. As she recounts the consequences of war-the downward spiral of the family fortune, the withering of hope at news from the battlefront, and the general uncertainty of civilian life in the South-Fennell's diaries constitute one of the few contemporaneous records of north Alabama, including the shelling and burning of Guntersville, which has been poorly documented in the historiography of the Civil War. Editor Whitney Snow's compilation adds to the now growing genre of women's Civil War diaries"--