In the major literary writing by women in New Orleans in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the theme of home is a central preoccupation, and it is often figured in the literal houses the main female characters inhabit and the landscape that surround these houses. What these houses and landscapes mean varies for each of them, but all of them share an interest in the power of storytelling as a tool for taking ownership over a space and thereby achieving a certain autonomy – a sense of home – with regard to a world that would otherwise dominate them.

The location of New Orleans constitutes a paradox, for a city on this site is both inevitable and impossible, the boundaries between land and water ever changeful, and human settlement always understood as unsettled – that is, provisional and an ongoing project of problem solving. The settlers’ attitudes toward swamps in general determined their understanding of the particular city that sprang up among them. The swamps, they thought, were a source of deadly disease, an endless hiding place for smugglers and runaway slaves, and it thus carried moral, political and even racial overtones, as reflected in the writing of the first historian of New Orleans, Charles Gayarré and in other early commentary on the city.