Her age was always quite incredible, especially to herself. She sat smiling out into the noonday sun from her big chair in the window. All the French soldiers were very oncoming people…. Julian had taught her such good French, and so much of it, that she missed no nuances of Rochambeau’s compliments, and found them a trifle embarrassing. The Comte de Rochambeau had come to her wedding, and paid her French compliments while they danced. (To make the Legislative body safe from capture by a sea-borne army, he said, and even then the British nearly caught Jefferson.) It was lively enough for a while after Yorktown, while the French were still there.

But Williamsburg was old too, now, it had never been the same since Thomas Jefferson made them move the capital up river to Richmond, back in 1779 when he was Governor. It was a pretty street, in the soft autumn sunlight of Virginia. She sat at her window, looking out into the quiet street beyond the white picket fence and box hedges of the front garden waiting, like a good child, for it to be time to dress for her party. IT WAS her birthday, and she was ninety-five. Like Dawn's Early Light, Yankee Stranger is full of action and romance, but most importantly, it presents a vivid re-creation of a vanished world. In addition to the fictitious characters, Jeb Stuart and General Lee, Pickett, Magruder, and Stonewall Jackson are all seen through the eyes of the men who followed them into battle. The story moves from Williamsburg to Richmond to Washington and back again during the dreadful years between Fort Sumter and Appomattox.

Therefore, when a Yankee comes to Williamsburg in the tense autumn of 1860 and red-haired Eden Day falls heels over head in love with him, her great-grandmother takes the long view-besides, she likes him herself. And when she was a girl they never seemed to think much about Yankees, one way or the other. Once, she can remember, it was Massachusetts that was threatening to secede instead of South Carolina. Some of the characters are the descendants of those in the first novel of the series, Dawn's Early Light, and Grandmother Day, who was sixteen when Cornallis surrendered at Yorktown, is now ninety-five. Williamsburg, Virginia, is once more the scene, but the time is now the 1860s. Yankee Stranger is the second novel in the series. Elswyth Thane is best known for her Williamsburg series, seven novels published between 19 that follow several generations of two families from the American Revolution to World War II.

Yankee stranger by elswyth thane