A tongue-in-cheek look at society in the modern South and the regional styles of behavior characteristic of members of the two sexes is updated with a new afterword.

A tongue-in-cheek look at society in the modern South and the regional styles of behavior characteristic of members of the two sexes is updated with a new afterword.

Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is Florence King's classic memoir of her upbringing in an eccentric Southern family, told with all the uproarious wit and gusto that has made her one of the most admired writers in the country. Florence may have been a disappointment to her Granny, whose dream of rearing a Perfect Southern Lady would never be quite fulfilled. But after all, as Florence reminds us, "no matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street."

Each summer between 1790 and 1860, hundreds and eventually thousands of southern men and women left the diseases and boredom of their plantation homes and journeyed to the healthful and entertaining Virginia Springs. While some came in search of a cure, most traveled over the mountains to enjoy the fashionable society and participate in an array of social activities. At the springs, visitors, as well as their slaves, interacted with one another and engaged in behavior quite different from the picture presented by most historians. In the leisurely and pleasure-filled environment of the springs, plantation society's hierarchies became at once more relaxed and more contested; its rituals and rules sometimes changed and reformed; and its gender divisions often softened and blurred. In Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, Charlene Boyer Lewis argues that the Virginia Springs provided a theater of sorts, where contests for power between men and women, fashionables and evangelicals, blacks and whites, old and young, and even northerners and southerners played out—away from the traditional roles of the plantation. In their pursuit of health and pleasure, white southerners created a truly regional community at the springs. At this edge of the South, elite southern society shaped itself, defining what it meant to be a "Southerner" and redefining social roles and relations.

In some small Southern towns the old ways still exist. Breeding counts and the old boys hold court. Everyone has a place and no one's supposed to cross the line. But rules are made to be broken... In Southern Gentlemen, authors Jennifer Blake and Emilie Richards deliver two contemporary stories of family, love and betrayal, all set against the colorful backdrop of the Deep South. This is their South—filled with old families, old money and old grudges. A place where the finest women are ladies and the best men are gentlemen. And where men from the wrong side of town have more honor than all the blue bloods combined.