Rachel of Old Louisiana

Rachel O’Connor was an extraordinary woman. For nearly fifty years (from 1797 to 1846), she lived on a plantation near Bayou Sara in Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish. And for twenty-five of those years, after the death of her husband, she managed the plantation alone. Although they had, as she said, “begun poor,” at the time of her death she owned about a thousand acres and seventy-five slaves.

Not a biography in the conventional sense, Avery O. Craven’s charming little book is rather the s...