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Margaret Junkin Preston
1820–1897
A popular 19th-century American poet and writer, she published widely in magazines and books and became known for lyrical, often regionally rooted work. Her life linked literary culture with the upheavals of the Civil War and the rebuilding years that followed.
1 Audiobook
Beechenbrook
by Margaret Junkin Preston
About the author
Born in Pennsylvania in 1820, Margaret Junkin Preston grew up in a family deeply connected to education and public life. She later married John Thomas Lewis Preston of Lexington, Virginia, and much of her adult life was tied to that community.
Preston built a strong literary reputation as a poet and prose writer, publishing in leading periodicals and bringing out several books over the course of her career. Her writing often drew on domestic life, religion, memory, and the emotional strain of war, helping make her one of the better-known Southern women writers of the 19th century.
She died in 1897, but her work remained part of the story of American literary life in the Civil War era and beyond. Readers often remember her for the way she joined personal feeling with historical experience in poems that are direct, musical, and emotionally clear.