To Have and to Hold (1899) is a novel by American author Mary Johnston. It was the bestselling novel in the United States in the following year (1900). To Have and to Hold is the story of an English soldier, Ralph Percy, turned Virginian explorer iIPn colonial Jamestown. Ralph buys a wife for himself - a girl named Jocelyn Leigh - little knowing that she is the escaping ward of King James I, fleeing a forced marriage to Lord Carnal. Jocelyn hardly loves Ralph - indeed, she seems to abhor him. Carnal, Jocelyn's husband-to-be, eventually comes to Jamestown, unaware that Ralph Percy and Jocelyn Leigh are man and wife. Lord Carnal attempts to kidnap Jocelyn several times and eventually follows Ralph, Jocelyn, and their two companions - Jeremy Sparrow, the Separatist minister, and Diccon, Ralph's servant - as they escape from the King's orders to arrest Ralph and carry Jocelyn back to England. The boat they are in, however, crashes on a desert island, but they are accosted by pirates, who, after a short struggle, agree to take Ralph as their captain, after he pretends to be the pirate "Kirby". The pirates gleefully play on with Ralph's masquerade, until he refuses to allow them to rape and pillage those aboard Spanish ships. The play is up when the pirates see an English ship off the coast of Florida. Ralph refuses to fire upon it, knowing it carries the new Virginian governor, Sir Francis Wyatt, but the pirates open fire, and Jeremy Sparrow, before the English ship can be destroyed, purposefully crashes the ship into a reef. The pirates are all killed, but the Englishmen (and woman) are rescued by the Governor's ship.

1912. Johnston, an American novelist, wrote books that combine romance with history. She is chiefly remembered for To Have and to Hold, a story of colonial Virginia, and its successor, Audrey. She also wrote two novels that were Civil War stories, including this volume, Cease Firing.

"The two rode on. To left and right were lighted streets of tents, visited here and there by substantial cabins. Soldiers were everywhere, dimly seen within the tents where the door-flap was fastened back, about the camp-fires in open places, clustering l

The story's heroine, young Hagar Ashendyne, questions the constraints of her culture and eventually, through the freedom gained by her writing career, escapes its restrictions. Her struggle for independence and subsequent growth relect many of the dilemmas faced by southern women in the early twentieth century. A work of great scope, the heroine moves from the family plantation in the postwar South to a New York City tenement, from Fabian London to Caribbean moonlight.

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Lewis Rand is a poor boy of the early 1800's. His father is a tobacco farmer and is totally against "book larnin'", but Lewis manages to educate himself.