In Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite, Barbara Burlison Mooney provides a critical, Marxist analysis of Virginia’s Tidewater plantation houses as expressions of Virginia’s eighteenth-century gentry culture. Mooney seeks to demonstrate that analyzing members of Virginia’s colonial gentry can reveal much about the mansions they created. As a result, the book deals less with issues of architectural design than with the social and cultural context in which the architecture was created. Rather...