author
Margaret Junkin Preston
1820–1897
A major voice in 19th-century American poetry, she wrote with emotional clarity about home, faith, grief, and the Civil War. Her life linked literary culture with the world of Virginia history, and her poems helped make her one of the best-known Southern poets of her time.
1 Audiobook
Beechenbrook A Rhyme of the War
by Margaret Junkin Preston
About the author
Born in Milton, Pennsylvania, in 1820, she was the daughter of George Junkin, a Presbyterian minister and college president. She was educated largely at home, and later became an American poet and author whose work appeared widely in the 19th century.
After marrying John Thomas Lewis Preston in 1857, she lived in Lexington, Virginia, where family life, religion, and the upheaval of the Civil War shaped much of her writing. She became especially associated with the South and was widely read for poems that joined personal feeling with public events.
She died in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1897. Her reputation has endured through her Civil War-era verse, her religious and domestic poetry, and the lasting record of her letters and published work.