Lady Baltimore

Owen Wister, the author who defined the American Western, returned to his native South for this witty and wistful romance. The story follows Augustus, a young man haunted by questions of heritage, who arrives in the fading seaside town of Kings Port, South Carolina, seeking to understand who he is and where he comes from. His eccentric Aunt Carola has stirred in him a fascination with ancestry, but what he finds is a society at once beautiful and brittle, clinging to its traditions even as the modern world encroaches. At the center of Kings Port's tight circles stands the impending wedding of the dashing John Mayrant to the complex and captivating Hortense Rieppe, and Augustus finds himself drawn into their orbit, and into the intricate dance of Southern courtship, where every glance and gesture carries the weight of expectation. Wister paints the South with a novelist's eye for detail and a satirist's wit, layering humor beneath the romance to examine what it means to live by codes of honor that may no longer serve the people who uphold them. The result is a book that works as both a love story and a quiet elegy for a world passing into memory.