Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case Of Myra Clark Gaines (Southern Biography)

The legal crusade of Myra Clark Gaines (1804?-1885) has all the trappings of classic melodrama—a lost heir, a missing will, an illicit relationship, a questionable marriage, a bigamous husband, and a murder. For a half-century the daughter of New Orleans millionaire Daniel Clark struggled to justify her claim to his enormous fortune in a case that captivated the nineteenth-century public. Elizabeth Urban Alexander taps voluminous court records and letters in her gripping account of the longest continuous litigation in U.S. history, a case considered seventeen times by the Supreme Court.