An Island in the South is set during Reconstruction and is the story of Georgia Rhodes, the daughter of Zimri Rhodes, the protagonist of Winds of the South. Georgia, like her newspaper editor father, is an idealist who opposed slavery and Southern secession. She goes to Beaufort, SC, immediately after the war to help educate the freed slaves and their children. While there, she meets Antonio Jones, a Union army officer whose mother was a famous actress and ardent abolitionist prior to the war. A romance ensues, but is complicated by the appearance of a rival in the person of one Edward Benson, a young Confederate army officer recently freed from a Union POW camp. Benson is bent on recovering his family's plantation, which has fallen into disrepair and is about to be auctioned off to the freedmen. He has greater ambitions, though: to restore both the glory of Lynwood, as the plantation is called, and the Old South.