The Foxes of Harrow

The two Harrow novels trace the rise and aftermath of a Louisiana plantation dynasty across the destruction of the slaveholding order. The Foxes of Harrow begins with Stephen Fox arriving in New Orleans in 1825 and building wealth, status and the plantation of Harrow inside a society structured by slavery and racial caste. The Vixens shifts to the generation that inherits the consequences after the Civil War, when emancipation and defeat have broken the economic and political foundations on which that world rested.
Read together, the sequence moves from antebellum ambition to Reconstruction-era conflict. Yerby keeps romance, rivalry and family inheritance in the foreground while the larger historical movement—from plantation slavery through war to white-supremacist resistance and the uncertain freedoms of Reconstruction—changes what power, property and social rank mean for every character.