My Dearest Angel: A Virginia Family Chronicle 1895-1947

She was the daughter of a circuit judge and state senator. He was the youngest son of Virginia’s Civil War governor and a state legislator himself at the age of nineteen. Their courtship and marriage stands as a portrait of a bygone way of life unique to the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. My Dearest Angel is their story, told through their long and passionate correspondence over the trial of their fifty years together. Piecing together the voluminous letters, their granddaughter, noted author Katie Letcher Lyle, has succeeded in giving us an intimate panoroma of the full and oftentimes wrenching lives that were led by Greenlee and Katie Letcher. Interspercing the narrative of their life together with extensive passages from their letters, Lyle has conventional biography a traditional documentary edition, allowing the reader a full sample of domestic life, family secrets, and social history of twentieth century Virginia and the South. Although their houseguests included luminaries from William Jennings Bryan to General Pershing and their presence is documented in these pages, the abiding appeal My Dearest Angel, is the maturation of a life-long relationship between a husband and a wife built on the crest of a changing world.