In her novel Measure of Devotion (Regal House 2025) Nell Joslin takes readers on an intensely personal, first-person journey of rescue during the American Civil War. With blunt-force realism and eloquent descriptive prose, she brings to life the pervasive brutality and sporadic heroism, as well as deprivations, of the nation’s darkest time:
“Their eyes crawled over my skin as I followed the narrow path through the weeds to the outhouse, over broken crockery, a sole-less leather boot, a stub of candle mounted on a bayonet stuck into the ground, rotting remnants of clothing, greasy bald patches where dirty water had been tossed.
We passed the dark eyes of empty houses whose lanes and fields were overgrown with saplings. In a grove of longleaf pines, we stopped to fill the space behind the seat with the rasping pinecones, large as melons and heavy with resin that would kindle a hardwood log.
I cut off a lock of hair and two jacket buttons. In his haversack, I found a scant handful of dried beans, another of corn kernels, and a few acorns—his sustenance for fighting all day on the side of a mountain.”
The protagonist, Susannah, is not entirely loveable, exhibiting harshness and resentment, as well as a gritty brand of kindness. Through a series of time-shifting vignettes, readers learn of Susannah’s unhappy childhood, marred by the loss of her mother and the ridicule of her peers. At fifteen, Susannah marries a much-older man, Jacob Shelburne, subsequently finding herself transplanted from the North Carolina mountains to South Carolina, where she gives birth to her only child, Francis.
The Shelburne family represents a Gordian knot of dysfunction: Susannah rejects her husband Jacob, Jacob shuns his son Francis, and Francis treats his mother with ridicule, sarcasm, and avoidance. Family tension reaches a peak when Francis joins the Confederate Army against the wishes of his Union-sympathetic parents.
Francis would not survive the War without the favor of a particular Confederate officer, a friend of Jacob Shelburne. That preferential treatment assigns him to a house instead of a wretched field hospital when he is gravely injured in battle. Upon receiving a telegram, Susannah leaves an ailing Jabob and sets out for Tennessee to find and help her son.
The mother’s ordeal involves the danger and discomfort of travel, the challenge of staying warm and clean in winter, chronic scarcity of food, the dire nature of her son’s wound, and the barbarity of some of the men she encounters. About the time she feels assured of Francis’s survival, she receives her own wounds and scrambles to recover in time to secure Francis’s parole before he, by now a prisoner of war, is sent to a prison camp.
This parole endeavor exposes Susannah to additional physical and emotional pain, pain which might be eased by the kindly Dr. Andreas who assists her. Instead of thanking him, she lashes out with all the fury of her suffering. She returns to her ungrateful son’s bedside to receive one more shock, immediately followed by another in the form of devastating news from home.
By now the reader may feel every form of human failing has been exposed. Is redemption remotely possible? It is, thanks to Susannah’s unfailing determination and courage, as well as several threads of light that grace her path. One thread is Major Benjamin Eleazar, a Union officer with a decades-long bond to Jacob Shelburne. Another is Dr. Matthias Andreas, the German doctor who serves the Union army and offers repeated help to Susannah and Francis.
These men smooth the way for war-ravaged Susannah and several people close to her. By the time Susannah receives one final blow from son Francis, Eleazer and Andreas have helped her not only to survive but to glimpse Eden on the far side of Hell.
Nell Joslin
Nell Joslin is a fiction writer who has also been a public-school teacher, journalist, and attorney. Recipient of an MFA degree from North Carolina State University, she lives in Raleigh.
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