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Commentary On The Book 'A Soldier's Secret'

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Fiction Prompt #3
In the book A Soldier’s Secret, the story is told from the perspective of Sarah Emma Edmonds, alias Frank Thompson. Sarah Emma Edmonds is a soldier, nurse, and spy for the Union Army of the Civil War. To avoid an arranged marriage and get away from her father’s abusive hands, Sarah escaped Brunswick, Canada dressed in her brother’s clothes as a man. You learn very quickly that the story is told Sarah’s perspective. For example, when Sarah is enlisting, she is told that she cannot enlist because she is too young. When this happens, Sarah states, “I freeze. Can he tell? I’m wearing a shirt, vest, and trousers as usual, my curly hair cut short except for a lock that insists on falling over my forehead” (1). This shows …show more content…

Throughout the entire book the author talks about the different challenges the many women of the Civil War overcame even though they did not have to face these challenges in the first. At the end of the book the author even states, “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr… summed up the Civil War experience of his generation with these words: ‘In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.’ When we think about the bravery of those who fought in the Civil War, we can now honor the passionate women whose hearts were also touched with fire and who went to extraordinary lengths to serve as soldiers” (93). With this very firm statement, it becomes clear that if you look into the core of all the things that women soldiers of the Civil War did, they all were fueled with the same driving force as any of their fellow male comrades. This message is very clear because the book includes many chapters such as, “Reasons for Becoming a Soldier,” “A Soldier’s Life,” “Women at Antietam,” and “Hospitals and Prisons.” All of these chapters (and others) contain information about women soldiers’ perseverance and the differences of men to women soldiers which, unsurprisingly, is not a lot other than

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