In her Preface (dated Austin, 1889) Annie Holland calls herself "a southern woman who lived through" the story she tells: how the plantation aristocracy was driven into exile from Louisiana by the Civil War and then, after Emancipation, forced to live in Texas with enfranchised "negroes" who, once the "civilizing influence of slavery" is removed, threaten the country with an "African savagism." Holland appropriates a number of Stowe's characters (Topsy, for example, comes back from Miss Ophelia's Vermont home as a would-be genteel "Mrs. Smith," though she soon reverts to minstrel type). Although Stowe herself does not appear, the narrator regularly refers to her by name as the author of "the refugees's" sufferings--and the real villain of American history. In its rage against Reconstruction and its unapologetic racism, as well as in its curious determination to co-opt Stowe's characters, Holland's novel anticipates Dixon's White Man's Burden; but she has none of his (or Stowe's) polemical skill, and the novel she wrote seems to have had little or no success with American readers.