Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth. By SHIRLEY A. versity of Oklahoma Press, 1993. xxiv + 419 pp. $26.95.) In the story of Elizabeth "Libbie" Custer and her darling "boy general" husband, the American Victorians of the latter nineteenth century stand revealed with much greater sensuality and complexity than they would have liked to admit for themselves. Spouting pieties of domestic fidelity, self-restraint, and modest affection, Elizabeth and George Armstrong lived instead a passionate life in a m a n n e r reminiscent of aristocrats in the declining European empires: indulgent, willful, even tyrannical, and with practiced eroticism. This is the story Shirley A. Leckie, associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida, tells in luxurious detail. She uses the occasion to develop broader themes, such as the workings of the domestic ideology whereby Elizabeth hid her ambitions, even from herself. Unfortunately, the deeper themes as well as the grand historical drama retreat somewhat u n d e r the assault of Leckie's u n y i e l d i n g devotion to chronological narrative. In the long run, Leckie's day-planner approach may be a welcome drawback for subsequent scholars (and likely movie producers) who will find many a lead in this first comprehensive biography of the author and mythmaker who would be content to be r e m e m b e r e d as Custer's wife.
LECKIE.
(Norman: Uni-
T h e early chapters unfold the history of a girl who, like her later husband and like her nation, was certain she deserved to be at the center of attention. Leckie draws Elizabeth's character with details such as the confessional childhood diary entries that reveal her learning to manipulate people's sympathies when her mother died. Leckie continues the story by relying not only on the voluminous records the two principals left behind (George Armstrong Custer's letters to his wife regularly expanded to forty pages) but also on everything from plays the couple attended to military history. The fulsome picture that emerges includes Elizabeth pressing dried ferns to the window pane in their military quarters to create "a bit of fairy land"; Elizabeth and George and friends romping with the couple's eighty (!) hounds; and Custer's courtmartial retold in the context of the l o n g s t a n d i n g tug-of-war of t h e Custers' extramarital flirtations. T h e final third of the book chronicles the fifty-seven years of the subject's life after the great turning point of Custer's death. Another drama unfolds there, as the self-identified devoted wife discovers in lesson after reallife lesson that she has no power u n d e r the ideology she herself embraces. Burdened by Custer's gambling debts,