Novel about Varina Howell, the wife of Jefferson Davis. No woman in America ever lived a life like that of vivid Varina Howell Davis, the First Lady of the Confederacy, "Queen of the Lost Cause." Born an aristocrat in cotton-rich Natchez on the Mississippi, she left her home at eighteen to face an uncertain future as the wife of an enigmatic country man, Jefferson Davis—and to embark on a swift, kaleidoscopic career such as she had never dreamed of. At his side she rose to eminence in the turbulent years that brought was between North and South. She knew giddy triumph—the tinseled success of a great beauty, a triumphant woman of the world of Washington, D.C. She knew sudden ups and downs—defeat, sorrow, loss, and retirement to her river plantation. Then, again, came a swift rise to rank higher than before—that of a Cabinet wife, with the country's decisions being made all around her, and a part for her in the making. For a time it seemed that the White House of Washington would be her eventual home. Again, a step downward, and then up again, to the rank of the Confederacy's Lustrous Lady. Dazzling days again, and then trial and defeat—the black hours of a fugitive, her husband facing death. In these hours she became a great personage, a human being fighting for survival: and she won. Above all, Bride of Fortune is the story of a woman in love—a portrait of a passionate, warm-hearted woman who never faltered in her devotion. For Varina and Jefferson Davis it was one long love affair. Here is a picture of modern America in the making, of Washington and wartime Richmond from inside; and the story of the woman behind the man in the spotlight. No conventional crinolined miss, Varina was a firm-spirited, firm-minded woman who knew what she wanted her life to be and waded forth to make it that way. Some hated her; others loved her; nobody was ever neutral. And all about her moved the great of her day—Presidents, grand dames, plantation owners, Cuban revolutionaries, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee. Here is a rich and moving story, a superbly readable one, a remarkable evocation of the native South. Harnett T. Kane, who has never written a book that wasn't a best seller, outdoes all his other successes, bringing to surging life the vivid-hued Richmond: gay-hearted Natchez on the river; lush New Orleans of the Creoles, and Washington, capital of the nation when its life was at stake.