Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) is an American Civil War novel by veteran John William De Forest.
As a captain of the Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers, De Forest had seen action in the Civil War in Louisiana in 1862 and in the Shenendoah Valley campaign in 1864 before being discharged for health problems.
[1] He published Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty in 1867 as a critique of slaveholding Southern society.
Though William Dean Howells praised DeForest as a "realist before realism was named",[citation needed] most critics[who?]
have argued that the Romantic elements of his plot mix poorly with the otherwise admirable realism of the battle scenes.