Echoes from the Past.
Bryan, Mary Norcott. Echoes from the Past, (1921).
8vo.; title page foxed; frontispiece black and white photograph; black and white portrait of Bryan as a young girl between pages 32-33; cracked at hinge; green cloth; stamped in gilt.
First edition of a collection compiled by Norcott of “letters” to her children telling the life story of her own mother, to whom the book is dedicated. The letters are numbered within the book, but are narrated by Bryan and meant to be read as a biography. The latter half of the book contains excerpts of letters written to Bryan by her mother between 1854 and 1859.
Born in New Bern, NC, Mary Norcott Bryan (1841-1925) grew up on a plantation and attended boarding school in Washington D.C. She met her husband, Henry Ravenscroft Bryan, after moving back to North Carolina, and the two traveled across the South together before settling down to raise a family. Bryan gave birth to eleven children in her lifetime, three of whom died in infancy. She published one other book in her lifetime: A Grandmother’s Recollections of Dixie (New Bern, NC: Owen C. Dunn, 1912), a personal memoir told through a collection of fictional letters to her grandchildren about life in the antebellum South. (http://docsouth.unc.edu/bryan/ summary/html)
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