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She was the daughter of a circuit judge and state senator. He was the youngest son of Virginia's Civil War governor and was a state legislator himself at the age of nineteen. Their courtship and marriage stands as a portrait of a bygone way of life unique to the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. My Dearest Angel is their story, told through their faithful correspondence over the course of their fifty years together.
Piecing together the voluminous letters, their granddaughter, noted author Katie Letcher Lyle, has succeeded in giving us an intimate panorama of the full and oftentimes wrenching lives led by Greenlee and Katie Letcher. Interspersing the narrative of their life with extensive passages from their letters, Lyle has constructed a hybrid of conventional biography and a traditional documentary edition, allowing the reader a full sample of domestic life, family secrets, and the social history of twentieth-century Virginia and the South.
Luminaries from William Jennings Bryan to General Pershing were among the houseguests whose visits are documented in these pages, but the abiding appeal of My Dearest Angel is the maturation of a lifelong relationship built on the crest of a changing world.
