The Wedding Dress
by Virginia Ellis
-Reviewed by Elaine Williams


The Wedding Dress takes place in the South at the end of the Civil War and concerns the reconstruction of the hopes of three Confederate ladies.  The novel has several elements in common with that greatest of Southern Civil War novels: Gone with the Wind. The main character is a strong woman who must make the necessary decisions, the plantation is in trouble, and there is a youngest sister who fears she will never find a man to marry among the few bachelors who survived the war. In spite of these similarities. The Wedding Dress is not a sweeping, memorable epic, but a simple story of hope and the need to deal with ghosts from the past in order to move forward.

The narrator is Julia, the middle of three sisters. Her husband William died two years previously in Gettysburg. Eldest sister Victoria's husband, James, is missing, believed killed in action in the battle of Chickamauga, and Claire, the youngest sister at 17, has lost hope for marriage at all. The sisters' parents are dead (the author never really explains what exactly happened to them). In the midst of all this sorrow, Julia and Victoria decide to start sewing a wedding dress for Claire to give her some hope while they plan to find her a groom.
As time passes and the dress takes shape, Julia must deal with her past when Sergeant Monroe Tacy arrives with a gift from her dead husband William. There is also the possibility that Sergeant Tacy could be Claire's long hoped-for groom, if only Claire can be persuaded to marry him.

Another problem faces the sister: they have been seeing ghosts of Confederate soldiers on their land and along the county roads. These visions function in the novel to foreshadow the the return of the men in their lives, both literally and figuratively. Each sister's life is transformed by the end of the novel through the hope that the wedding dress brings.

Author Virginia Ellis has also written several books under the name of Lyn Ellis, for the Harlequin Temptation series. The Wedding Dress is quite a departure from that line! No more than two or three chaste kisses are exchanged in this new novel.

Ms. Ellis writes from a unique perspective as a Vietnam war widow, saying that she is "inherently drawn to the quiet tragedies and triumphs of women who lost their men forever. The result is The Wedding Dress."

This is a fairly short, pleasant novel for those who enjoy historical fiction with a light touch of romance.
 

Highland County District Library
Highland County, OH