Social Life in Old New Orleans: Being Recollections of my Girlhood , by Eliza Ripley . (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912. Pp. 332.)

In a brief biographical sketch, appended to these memoirs, we are informed that the author died shortly after making the last arrangements for their publication. Thus this account of old New Orleans, of seventy years ago, becomes the more impressive, now that another is gone of the few who could supply it.

Novelists in search of local color will find a rich store here. The setting and the activities of every-day life are described with rare accuracy and minuteness. Receptions, balls, and weddings; the fashion in dress for both sexes, young and old; the topography of New Orleans, and its architecture; furniture, tapestries, and pictures, the preparing and serving of meals; the opera, old music, old songs; schools and old-fashioned ideas of bringing up children; the plantation-life of masters and slaves; these and many other topics are discussed at length. There are also frequent references to her contemporaries. Of the celebrities of her day she was acquainted with many; some famed in the annals of New Orleans, some of wider reputation. Their names are often linked with interesting biographical details and descriptions of their persons and characters.

A praiser of her times, though she has only kind words for the present, one fancies that with her strong memory she must have preferred to dwell in the past even more than is the wont of old age. And none will refuse to tarry with her in the glorified past who feels the charms of invariable good humor and of a youthful heart.

Not the least interesting of the hors-d'oeuvres which lend variety to the narrative is the account of how Lexington won the great race in 1854, and of the swarming of the Kentucky belles and their escorts into New Orleans to be present at his triumph: “The race, the only one I had ever witnessed, was tremendously exciting, and as the gallant horses swept round the last lap, Lexington, ever so little, in the lead, the uproar became quite deafening. One of the Johnson women, beautiful and enthusiastic, sprang upon the bench and said to her equally excited escort, `Hold me while I holler.' He threw his strong arms about her and steadied her feet. `Now, holler.' And never did I hear the full compass of the female voice before, nor since.”

New Orleans is interesting, directly or indirectly, for its Creole population. There can be no complaint that this subject does not receive at the hands of the author the attention it deserves. But it may be urged, perhaps, that whatever information she imparts is of an external character. It is true that the quaintness of Creole objects and ways, as the term is usually understood, does not imply analysis of character. At any rate the average tourist, who seems to feel repaid for his pains, probably makes no great progress in this direction. It would be no reproach to say that, even from the picturesque point of view, she supplies materials for the picture rather than the picture itself. The reviewer remembers Loti's magical homesick visions of French colonial life, evoked by the master with a few simple words. But Loti's intense visions doubtless exist in his mind only; they are reproduced in the reader's by insistence on merely a few details, and they could not have the informational value of these memories. From the moral and intellectual standpoint, the book which shall describe the Creoles of Louisiana is still to be written, at any rate, the book which shall satisfy the subject. The author of such a book can surely only be one who has been steeped in that strange experience of living in two atmospheres at once, a French and an English, as far apart as may be, who is conscious of so equally balanced claims upon his sympathy that he hardly knows in which direction to incline, who speaks and thinks and laughs now in obedience to the one, now to the other.

E. J. Villavaso

How to cite:
Villavaso, E. J., "Social Life in Old New Orleans: Being Recollections of my Girlhood", Volume 016, Number 4, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online, Page 433 - 434. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publications/journals/shq/online/v016/n4/review_29.html
[Accessed Sun Nov 23 2:57:36 CST 2008]