Bright Days in the Old Plantation Time

Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1882. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/very good. First binding with the title lettering in gilt. 12mo (198 x 137mm), [6], 266, [4], with inserted plates by James H. Moser. In the original green pictorially blocked in black and lettered in gold, gray floral-patterned endpapers with the original printed dustjacket. Light shelf-wear to the cloth, else fine in the integral and unrepaired jacket with light soiling, chips to the extremities and abrasions to the back panel, else very good and, obviously, rare. Reference: Wright, 286. Bright Days in the Old Plantation Time is a collection of dialect stories set on an antebellum Georgia plantation, founded on the experiences of the author, with illustrations by James H. Moser. Published the year after Harris's Uncle Remus, the book includes both original tales and new retellings of traditional material, among them an independent version of the Tar Baby folk tale.

Mary Ross Banks was a Georgia writer whose literary fame rested entirely on this single volume. The book belongs to a broader movement in late nineteenth-century American letters in which Southern writers sought to preserve, through the conventions of dialect fiction, the oral traditions and folk narratives of the plantation South.