Recollections of a Southern Daughter recalls life in antebellum Liberty County, Georgia, a time and place best known today through the letters of the Charles Colcock Jones family, published in the classic Children of Pride, and the letters and journals of the Roswell King, Fanny Kemble, and Joseph LeConte families. In this memoir Cornelia Jones Pond gives an eyewitness account of how the privileged life of the southern slaveholding class was destroyed by a whirlwind of change.

The narrative begins in 1834, when Pond was born to one of the Old South's wealthiest plantation families. It ends in 1875, when she was a minister's wife and the mother of four daughters, trying to make her way in the drastically changed post-Civil War South. In Recollections of a Southern Daughter Pond renders with immediacy and affectionate detail not only her personal past but also the tremendous upheavals of history that she witnessed firsthand.