In the beginning of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, twenty-year-old Quentin Compson wonders why the elderly Rosa Coldfield selected him as her partner in the excavation of the Sutpen and Coldfield family histories. There were other family members whom she could have chosen as her confidant and others for whom the names Thomas Sutpen and Ellen Coldfield would have had immediate resonance. “Why tell me about it?” the puzzled Quentin asks his father. “Ah,” Mr. Compson replies, “Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the war came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?”

Since the 1980s, an explosion of interest in southern women’s history has helped to turn Mr. Compson’s “ghosts” into real, flesh-and-blood historical actors. Scores of biographies and monographs as well as edited volumes of women’s writings have shed considerable light on the intellectual lives of women, particularly the wealthy mistresses of the plantation. Through such analyses, historians have found a lively literary culture in the region, a culture to which women contributed significantly.