author
Dolly Sumner Lunt
1817–1891
A Maine-born diarist who spent much of her life on a Georgia plantation, she left behind a vivid personal record of everyday life, grief, labor, and the Civil War. Her journals are still read for their unusually immediate view of Sherman's March through Georgia and the complicated world she inhabited.
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About the author
Born in Bowdoinham, Maine, in 1817, Dolly Sumner Lunt later moved south and became known through the journals she kept in Georgia. Editors and historians have drawn on those diaries to trace her life across decades of teaching, marriage, motherhood, widowhood, and plantation management.
Her best-known writing comes from the Civil War years, especially her account of Sherman's army passing through her plantation. Those entries helped make A Woman's Wartime Journal an enduring primary source, valued not because it is simple or comfortable, but because it captures events and emotions as she experienced them.
Modern editions of her papers, including The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848–1879, have kept her work in circulation for readers interested in women's history, the Civil War, and daily life in the nineteenth-century South. Through those pages, her voice remains direct, observant, and deeply human.