This antique hardcover book is bound in green cloth boards, with gilt spine lettering. Heavy edgewear, especially at lower spine where small portion of cloth has chipped loose; bookplate on front inner board; intermittent foxing throughout, although many pages clean and unmarked. Simms' novel is set in 16th-century Florida among the French Huguenot colonists who once settled in that region. While The Lily and the Totem is a story of French Huguenots in sixteenth-century Florida, it is not, importantly, a historical romance. Rather, Simms here experimented with a new way in which to relate history—by telling history through fictionalized narratives that fill in the gaps between what we do and do not know about a time and place. The structure of The Lily and the Totem reflects Simms’s experiment, juxtaposing fictional narratives involving historical personages with “historical summaries.” (W. Matthew J. Simmons). 470 pages; approx. 5"x7".
- The Lily and the Totem: or, The Huguenots in Florida
- William Gilmore Simms
- Baker and Scribner, 1850
