'Charleston' author Margaret Thornton at Barnes & Noble Arboretum

Bradham Thornton

Eliza Poinsett is a fictional heroine, Southern at that. But she doesn't depend on the kindness of strangers, as do so many of the heroines of Tennessee Williams's plays.

Eliza is the invention of  Margaret Bradham Thornton, a graduate of Charleston's Ashley Hall and of Princeton University. She is the award-winning author of  "Tennessee Williams's Notebooks." After ten years of research into the great playwright's journals, she was unwilling to create a heroine who was waiting around for a man to rescue her.

Thornton's "Charleston" (Ecco, $25.99) tells the story of  two Charlestonians: Eliza, an art historian living in London, and charming newspaperman Henry Heyward, who is raising his nine-year-old son. The two happen to meet again in 1990, after a decade apart, at a wedding in the English countryside. A second chance? Maybe so.

Thornton herself grew up in Charleston, and the Charleston Mercury praised her eye for detail, "from the swamps of the ACE Basin to a South of Broad dinner party."

I'm hoping the author will call for questions. Be sure to ask her about the role of Henry James's heroine Isabel Archer, and what she found under the paint in the Charleston house she restored.

Meet the Author:

Thornton will sign copies of her book from 3-5 p.m., Wednesday, at Barnes & Noble at the Arboretum, 3327 Pineville-Matthews Road, Charlotte, 28226.

Novel based on harrowing story is set on a Lowcountry plantation

Dee Phelps

Disappointment rooms -- spaces in attics or basements fashioned to hide mentally or physically handicapped family members -- were a fact of life in the antebellum South.

The idea of such isolated bondage grips us, in both horror and fascination.

Dee Phelps, a long-time surgical nurse of Beaufort, S.C., listened as her mother-in-law told her the "fascinating and sometimes harrowing stories" passed down from her ancestors who once owned a  Lowcountry cotton and indigo plantation in Jasper Co., S.C.

Phelps did not consider herself a writer, but the stories she'd heard begged to be told. "The Disappointment Room" (River City, $26.95), in which a conniving mother hides her afflicted son in the attic, an act which affects the next eight generations, is the result of Phelps' perseverance in finally getting the stories on paper.

Pat Conroy calls the novel "haunting and fascinating." In her acknowledgments, Phelps says Conroy's wife, Cassandra King Conroy, "took me under her wing and helped me fly. A better mentor and friend would be hard to find. Thank you for helping me navigate my way around the perplexing world of publishing."

Phelps opens the novel in 1844 and uses as its fictional setting the now privately-owned Coffin Point Plantation in St. Helena Parish, Beaufort, S.C. The original house, no longer standing, was built about 1801 by Boston native Ebenezer Coffin, who married Mary Matthews, whose father gave the couple 1120 acres and 63 slaves.

In 1861, the Coffins, along with other sea island plantation owners, abandoned their homes as Union troops advanced into the Lowcountry.

"The Disappointment Room" recently won The Silver Falchion Award for Best First Novel at ceremonies in Nashville, Tenn.