The author of Lucile, the extended poem-story that the novel’s Parthenia Leila Ellis was reading the night the Rebels drove in the Union pickets at Fort Sanders, was actually a British diplomat using a pen name.

Thus Owen Meredith was really Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton and Lucile, published in 1860, was his third work of verse. By far the most popular of his works, it continued to be printed and sold up into the 1930s.

His father, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron of Lytton, was a popular English novelist and playwright credited with coining the well-known phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword.”