Charles Johnson's magnificent biography of Mary Telfair is a detailed examination of the life of a most remarkable woman. Born in 1791, Mary Telfair grew up in Savannah, Georgia, where she was the daughter of a wealthy merchant-planter and threeterm governor of Georgia. Although reared in the South, she bore no kinship to the plantation mistress living in isolation--alienated by paternalism and male domination. Rather she belonged to an elite circle of urban Southerners who felt as much at home in the drawing rooms of Philadelphia and New York as in the parlors of Charleston and Savannah. Many of the country's leading figures passed through the lives of the Telfairs, and the Telfairs were related to, or close friends with, most of the prominent families in Savannah and the Georgia upcountry--relationships fully explored in this work. Johnson's legal training played a significant role in enabling him to unravel the climactic event in Mary Telfair's story--the great Telfair will contest, one of the epic legal battles of the nineteenth century. Drawing on a stunni

Raised in Darien, Connecticut, Charles Johnson graduated from Yale University and the Harvard Law School before practicing securities law in New York City for thirty-two years. In 1988 Johnson moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he and his wife collect tribal, Southwestern, and contemporary art