Description
The Valley of Shenandoah (1824) was probably the first important novel ever written by a Virginian and is a faithful portrayal of rural Virginia life, both in the Valley and on the plantation of the Tidewater. In his preface, George Tucker puts forward two reasons for having written the to present a “faithful picture of the manners and habits which lately prevailed in one of the most distinguished states of our confederacy,” and to offer an “instructive moral to the youth of both sexes.” Although George Tucker was clearly an amateur novelist, he was dealing with a locale and material that he knew well, and The Valley is remarkably free from imitation. The novel contains a number of elements found in the typical plantation novel, but it is not in these trappings that the strength of The Valley lies. It is rather in the realistic treatment of those aspects of plantation life which brought the Graysons to ruin and which caused the breakup of many old estates, allowing some of the less cultured but thrifty middle class to achieve economically what they never could have achieved socially. The Valley is a significant forerunner of both the plantation tradition and the local color school.
