On September 12, 1847, Madaline Edwards wrote in anger and despair to her married lover, a New Orleans businessman named Charles Bradbury: "I am nothing to you only an object of hate....I would if I dared ask to see you one time more no matter where or how, but I know you will hate me even for the desire. Oh! God can you ever know my feelings." A final bitter exchange of letters followed, and then their four-year affair was over.

Cut off from Bradbury's support and under to pressure to vacate the house he had provided for her, Edwards was alone and on her own. Estranged from most of her family and without prospects for employment or a respectable marriage, she was more than ever at odds with a society that placed a premium on women's domestic stability and dependence on men.

All that is likely to be known about the affair is told in this selection of Edwards's private writings. Offering a rare glimpse into the life and mind of an ordinary woman on the fringes of her middle-class society, the writings reveal the emotional, material, and economic contours of the relationship and convey Edwards's gnawing ambivalence about the high personal cost of the choices she had made.

Edwards eventually left New Orleans for California, where she died in 1854 and was buried in a pauper's grave. Charles Bradbury outlived her by a quarter-century.

As Upton says in his preface, "In the face of the glib talk of 'resistance' and 'subversion' current in some types of social history scholarship, Edwards reminds us that it is a more common human experience simply to get by, hoping for small forward steps rather than enormous leaps and usually achieving neither." Her writings are a moving and eloquent testimony to one who fought to retain her dignity and sense of self in a world that had little place for a woman on her own.