A Separate Country

In postwar New Orleans, former Confederate general John Bell Hood is physically disabled, publicly controversial and determined to establish a life beyond his military defeat. He marries Anna Marie Hennen, a woman from the city’s Creole elite, and together they create an exceptionally large family. Their story is reconstructed through several voices, including Hood, Anna Marie and Eli Griffin, a fictional servant whose perspective complicates the general’s account of himself.

The novel follows the couple through Reconstruction, financial insecurity and the social world of a city struggling to redefine itself after slavery. Hood’s efforts to control the record of his wartime decisions exist beside the demands of marriage and parenthood, until yellow fever destroys the household in 1879. By concentrating on Hood after the battlefield, the book examines responsibility, memory and whether private tenderness can be separated from service to the Confederacy.