Sweet Briar’s ‘Miss Daisy’ Makes Challenging Research Subject

Rising senior tackling biography of College’s first daughter

SUZANNE RAMSEY
College relations staff writer

Maggie Mae Nase

In the 1989 movie “Driving Miss Daisy,” Morgan Freeman’s character, Hoke, chauffeurs a prickly senior citizen around the American South. In Maggie Mae Nase’s research project, “Writing Miss Daisy,” the Sweet Briar rising senior is taking readers on a tour of the life of Daisy Williams, daughter of College founder Indiana Fletcher Williams.

Nase is writing a biography of Daisy for Sweet Briar’s Honors Summer Research Program, an eight-week session that gives students the opportunity to work one-on-one with faculty members. This summer, eight students worked on diverse projects with themes ranging from creative writing and theater to chemical compounds and ancient Greece.

Nase, who hails from Nevada, Mo., is working under the supervision of two faculty members: Sweet Briar Museum director Christian Carr and Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence Carrie Brown. For Carr, the timing couldn’t be better.

According to Carr, the only other known biography of Daisy was written by the late Ann Whitley, a 1947 Sweet Briar graduate and former museum director. Copies of Whitley’s book are in short supply, Carr said, and she’d been wondering how to replace them when they ran out.

“When I heard Maggie Mae was interested in historical biography as a literary form and was casting about for a subject — she’d hoped to work on her grandmother, but there wasn’t enough information — I suggested Daisy as a project,” Carr said.

Once the book is finished, Carr plans to have it printed and made available at the Sweet Briar Museum. “It will differ from the existing biography in that it will have academic citations, a bibliography and illustrations and, of course, it will be designed in keeping with our museum brochure, using the ribbon motif,” she said.

The prospect of being a published author thrills Nase, who is majoring in English and creative writing. “For a writer to have something published by the age of twenty-one seems to be gloriously ahead the curve and I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity,” she said.

Nase’s book is based on handwritten diaries Daisy kept before she died in 1884 at the age of 16, Williams family letters and papers, and secondary sources, such as books about Virginia history, childhood material culture and the Victorian Age.

She only recently began the actual writing process, starting with the book’s forward and introduction, having spent the bulk of the fellowship wading through paperwork. She compared the process to Alice in Wonderland’s “going down the rabbit hole.”

“One thing led to another which led to another,” she said. “I found out that my most valuable instinct in researching was curiosity, because when I found something interesting then I looked further and all of a sudden you would add a whole other dynamic to Daisy’s life.”

Nase’s inquisitiveness led her to pour over not only the diaries but hundreds of letters and papers, including Indiana Fletcher Williams’ will and an appraisal of her estate. She found the appraisal particularly intriguing, as it contained excruciating details on such things as the contents of the cupboards and a complete listing of books in the family’s library.

The items spoke volumes about life at Sweet Briar and in New York City, where the family had business holdings. For example, Daisy’s books — among them “Elementary Astronomy” and French, German and Italian dictionaries — offered clues as to how the girl was educated.

Although Nase admitted to having only a “mild interest Sweet Briar history” at the beginning of the project, “now that I’m in the throes of it all, every new little tidbit that comes up has become intensely interesting and exciting,” she said.

When she finally got to the writing stage, Nase said, it was “three thousand times harder than I thought it would be.” She’d written lots of papers for her college classes, but she soon discovered re-creating a 19th-century girl’s life in prose was something entirely different.

Sometimes, she confessed, it took 30 to 45 minutes to write a single sentence, and coming up with just the right adjectives to describe a person or place was a struggle. Where to begin and how to begin the book also led to quandaries. Nase’s other faculty advisor, Brown, an accomplished novelist, could sympathize.

“It’s a project of daunting scope, which in some ways is a wonderful thing for Maggie to discover because I think it gave her a realistic sense of the scale of the task before a historian or biographer,” she said. 

“That’s what she discovered, and I think at first that’s a daunting circumstance to face. But also, the exhilaration of learning to do something well is discovering that the task you imagined is actually much larger and more ambitious and therefore an interesting and exciting one.”

Nase plans to put the project on hold for the fall semester, as she has a full course load, but she will pick it back up in the spring as a three-credit independent study. In Brown’s opinion, however, finishing the book before next year’s Commencement is not the most important thing.

“The point of the honors program is to take students who have a specialized interest in a particular subject and give them the opportunity to pursue that single mindedly for a couple of months,” she said. “The best possible outcome is not necessarily the end product but what they learn along the way.

“It’s been great for me to actually work alongside [Maggie] or watch her discover the story of Sweet Briar and the history of this place. The story is really an enormously compelling story.”