[4] His father, John Alfred Alvirett, was a large planter and sheriff of Onslow County, North Carolina.

[3] During the American Civil War of 1861–1865, he served as a chaplain in the Confederate States Army in Alabama, under General Turner Ashby.

[1] Avirett served as the president of the Dunbar Institute, an Episcopal female seminary in Winchester, Virginia from 1865 to 1871.

[3] For the next twenty-five years, he was a priest in Sligo, North Carolina, Upper Marlboro and Silver Spring, Maryland,[5] followed by Waterville, New York.

[9] For David Anderson, a senior lecturer in cultural and political studies at Swansea University, the book was emblematic of nostalgic memoirs about the Old South, which was lost forever except in writing and memories.

[10] However, David Goldfield, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, suggests that it was "much less a re-creation of plantation life than a fantasy, part of the full-blown rehabilitation of the Old South that had been underway since the end of Reconstruction.