Hello all! I hope you enjoyed the post about the 19th-century writer Constance Fenimore Woolson from last week. I’m curious to know, do you read women’s writings from the 19th century, or do you gravitate towards the 20th and 21st centuries? I’ve noticed that there is a lot of interest in rediscovering women writers and artists from more recent periods, but less attention is paid to the MANY wonderful women writing in the 1800s or earlier. Let’s give them some love and share with each other the writers we’ve discovered from earlier centuries.
Random cool image of Victorian women with pens and papers, from here.
Catching up on your posts and this one really resonates as I have just finished reading Jane Eyre's Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine's Story by Jody Gentian Bower. It made me want to go back and re-read all the 19th century women writers that I read in high school and college. And I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never read any George Eliot. Although I became fascinated with her life after reading Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives. There is a new biography of Eliot just published. George Eliot: Whole Soul by Ilana Blumberg. I think Middlemarch will go on my summer reading list!
Yes, I loved The Morgesons when I first read it in grad school! I discuss Stoddard at length in my first book, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. I’d love to return to Stoddard again sometime. It’s been a while!
To answer your question, Anne, I do like 19th century authors and have read a handful of the most well-known, some of them listed here, but in truth, I gravitate toward 20th and 21st century women writers. That said, I'd like to read more 19th century writers. There are just so many novels to compete for one's attention these days. That's where letters like yours are so helpful in pointing us toward writers and titles that are worthy of investigation.
Yes, there are so many! And I’ve been enjoying discovering all of the women of the 20th century. (My research for 30 years was in American women writers of the 19th.)
I was on a huge early modern kick earlier last year, reading Margaret Cavendish, Mary Sidney's translations (gorgeous), Louise Labé, Laura Cereta. And then love Fanny Burney's Evalina (I wish someone would make a movie of it, it sparkles and Burney was a huge influence on Austen). Also Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgworth (Louise May Alcott's mom read all of Edgeworth to her girls) and on to nineteenth c. with Gail Hamilton, Fanny Fern, and especially Frances Ellen Watkins Harper--amazing stuff. And recently learned of Kate Field, who was a prolific journalist, editor in the nineteenth century, known for her wit and who rivalled Mark Twain during their lifetimes. I've been obsessed with this question the last few years when I realized how many women were writing at the same time as Dickinson, e.g. and then started looking backward and wow--women have always been writing. Wish so many more people knew their names and their work.
So well put, Freya! There are so many riches to be discovered, if only we would look. Thank you for this impressive list! My research has been on American women writers. I’m still getting to know the many early British women writers.
LOVE Fanny Fern, saucy and smart and earning highest for awhile in 1850s, I think. Also Harper-- so important for the equity movements toward the 20th c. My students were always flabbergasted to see (fictional) enslaved people in Iola Leroy having whole active lives to themselves, agency, and community. Her poetry is amazing, too! I should check out Gail Hamilton.
So great--can't believe how many women were the most popular during their day and are completely forgotten--and how prolific they were! Harper is so important and powerful. Love that.
What a fascinating question, and wonderful responses.
The question caused some soul-searching at my end: it caused a kind of internal tour of the pre-20th C writers whom I've read, on the one hand, and whose texts I regularly revisit (even if only mentally) on the other. It turns out that distressingly few of them are women.
In the second category (the ones whose texts I regularly revisit), several are people who are best known as children's books writers today, even if the books weren't considered children's books at the time: Edith Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett (though they barely meet the criteria since most of their output was after the turn of the century), and Louisa May Alcott. Other 19th century people are Jane Austen and Christina Rossetti (but she's really only for a single poem, which I happened to encounter in a broad-reaching poetry anthology). (Edited to add Emily Dickinson.)
Even in the first category, which is basically just people one has read and remembers well enough, even if one doesn't revisit their work often, the list is small! How upsetting. There's Mme de La Fayette ("La Princesse de Clèves), and d'Aulnoy (fairy tales), and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Phillis Wheatley and a pre-revolutionary poet whose name I've forgotten (yikes).
The Brontes, Georges Sand (but have I ever really read her, as opposed to about her?), George Eliot. I forgot about Edith Wharton and Mary Shelley until others mentioned them here.
I was fascinated by the letters between Jane Carlyle and her husband Thomas, but that's not the same.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Hopefully more names will come to mind on further thought!
There are quite a few here, in spite of your regret. I’ve been dipping into a recent biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It’s fascinating how much the author uncovered, digging under generations of misperception and neglect.
There really aren’t. I mean, if you had asked about pre-20c writers in general I’d have laughed and moved on, because that’s too much to tally.
But you ask about women specifically, and it boils down to a couple of handfuls of names. It’s genuinely disturbing. A thought-provoking question in many ways.
I’m hoping that this is just the spur-of-the-moment answer and that out from under the pressure of replying, more names will come to mind. (I guess the list would be longer already if one included letter-writers etc who are known for other reasons. )
What a great question! I'm a literary historian whose interests have moved from modernism back to the late18th/early 19th century. Two readable favorites are Rebecca Rush's novel Kelroy and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette.
And these women's lives are often just as fascinating as their books--or even more so.
I'm currently writing an intimate biography of three such audacious women writers, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, and Susanna Rowson, called The Muses of Massachusetts. All three grew up in Massachusetts on the eve of revolution; all three—a feminist, a socialite, and an actress—helped to transform Boston from a Puritan town to the "Metropolis of Massachusetts." Whenever I talk about these women, the response is—how have we never heard of them before? In a moment when women's voices and rights are being eliminated, it seems critical to tell the story of three women who dared to become public figures but whose lives and work have been written out of the stories we tell about our nation's beginnings.
Hi Betsy—This sounds like a wonderful project! I don’t know Morton, so I look forward to being enlightened! Have you published any shorter pieces about these three?
I haven't published/written about all three together--only individually and in academic venues. Sarah Wentworth Morton is the least well-known today but was a prolific poet, saloniste,and patron of the theater. If you know her at all, it's as the betrayed wife--whose husband has a child with her sister--in William Hill Brown's novel The Power of Sympathy. That was based on a real life scandal that, sadly, ended in Sarah's sister's (Fanny Apthorp) suicide. There was a public trial, and Sarah's husband, Perez Morton, was found not responsible for Fanny's death. John Adams told Sarah she should forgive her husband, but I am not sure she ever did. But there is so much more to her than this!
I got interested in them as a group when I learned that their lives came together at the Federal Street Theatre, the first theater in Boston--Sarah as a patron (and part owner), Judith as a playwright, and Susanna as an actress.
So glad to have a chance to share this with others!
I love Judith Sargent Murray--I have the same feeling over and over--how have we not heard of these amazing feminist women? (ha, rhetorical I know very well why.... grrrr.)
It’s been a long time since I’ve read it. It’s a shame that its reputation has been buried under layers of contemptuous criticism—for sentimentalism and racism. It definitely deserves to be more widely read and understood.
Yes, thanks to you and your readers I have a list. And after reading Willa Cather's My Antonia last month with Josh Dolezal here on Substack, I am ready to roll back time even further and dive into other overlooked treasures.
I grew up on Little House on the Prairie (books and TV series with Melissa Gilbert and Michael Landon). I think this predisposed me early for the 19th century. In grad school, I sampled a variety of periods but 19th-c. American and British women writers were hands-down my calling. Since mulling over the lovely post on Woolson, I wondered if you might sometime post on Harriet Prescott Spofford? I've been watching Sherlock lately and thinking how women writers of early detection narratives are entirely overlooked, too. Thanks for creating this community around women writers, past and present! A lot of writers mentioned in other comments are favorites, also! I love finding more obscure women writers, too-- often in anthology or monographs!
Hi Sarah—Spofford is interesting. I looked into her career when I was writing my first book, Writing for Immortality. But I didn’t focus on her. (My four figures were Woolson, Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Elizabeth Stoddard.). I’ve been thinking I should write about Stoddard. She was definitely audacious! Do you think Spofford was as well?
I'd love to hear your latest thoughts about Stoddard! She's my #1 favorite American writer from the 19th c. Base in part on your Writing for Immortality, I devoted a whole dissertation chapter to The Morgesons (alongside her column in the Daily Alta California, excavated from microfiche!). While knowing probably a little too much about Stoddard's life, I don't know anything about Spofford's - I've taught "Circumstance" and the first Mr. Furbush story ("In the Maguerriwock"), but I know little about her life. In the back of my brain, I'm thinking an alcoholic husband and the need to earn the family's income figures in, but I could be confusing her with others because that was so true of so many women writers in 19th-c. America. I would love to learn more about her life and oeuvre, if you are game!
Yes, sadly, so true! I looked into Spofford’s career at the Atlantic Monthly, which I wrote about in an article (open access: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/engl_facpubs/23/). But I don’t know much about her life. Unfortunately my work on women writers has veered far away from Stoddard since I published my first book. (I’m delighted to hear that it inspired you to write about her as well!) I’m sure a lot of valuable scholarship has been published on her since then.
Harriet Prescott Spofford is so interesting, and was hugely popular and influenced Dickinson's writing in many ways. I'd love to see her become more widely known too.
Wow--I didn't know that she influenced Dickinson! But I can imagine it. "Circumstance" is certainly a memorable story, casting a female in a sensational role and giving her an ingenious way out-- brain and voice saving the day.
She wrote to her sister in law Susan after reading Circumstance: "Dear S.: That is the only thing I ever saw in my life I did not think I could have written myself. You stand nearer the world than I do. Send me everything she writes." Ha, I love Dickinson's arrogance and wit. But I read that some scholars believe that one of Spofford's stories, where it's revealed at the end the narrator is dead, may have inspired a lot of Dickinson's poems where the speaker is already dead, etc.
Ah! That is fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I recommend visiting Dickinson's house in Amherst\, if you haven't already. This thread is making me admire the strong representation of women writers in the frontier-adventure genre, too!
I actually got to do a pilgrimage to her home last summer and spent an hour in her room writing--I'll never forget it. Such an amazing place, to think of the steps that have crossed that threshold over the decades. 💜
Besides Edith Wharton, whom I adore, my favorite 19th century American women writers are the short story writers Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. The label "local color" trivializes their accomplishments. If you don't know Freeman's work, start with her short story, "A New England Nun." That and "The Revolt of Mother" are her best-known stories.
So glad you mentioned Sarah Orne Jewett! I love her stories and style. I’ve read The White Heron (haunting) and The Country of Pointed Firs. I was so enamored by the latter that I sought out a first edition and keep it on a special shelf. Another writer from the late 1800s who is rarely mentioned is Ellen Glasgow from Richmond, Virginia: she wrote about the South after Reconstruction (although I only ever read her autobiography, which I loved). Have a copy of that too. I’d like to return to reading both of these remarkable women.
I'm in several book clubs to pull me OUT of the nineteenth century. Otherwise, I'd be there entirely, mostly with Grace King's letters and writings and with secondary sources about the period. Oh, yeah.
I gravitate to earlier women, 18th and 19th century, but also if enough is known, early modern. I have a blog series I call foremother poets, and you can reach some of them here. I have favorites among the 19th century novelists, Anne Bronte's two novels, Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and less well known women and have written essay & reviews of books, and yet more blogs:
I've been reading Dorothy Sayers recently. I've never stopped reading Austen or about her since I was 13. I often love Virago books, especially with the green frames.
I have trouble understanding Liber: the tones, idiolects and assumptions puzzle me.
I've been reading several group bios of women, and Dorothy Sayers is featured in two: Mo Moulton's Mutual Admiration Society and Francesca Wade's Square Haunting. Both great reads!
You make a great point. I'm immersed in the early to mid 20th century female writers but have a kind of block about 19th century women writers. I have struggled in the past with Edith Wharton and Hodgson-Burnett and think that has maybe put me off...would love some recommendations-apart from the obvious 19th century (and previous) classics.
Too many to list, of course!!! But Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Lydia Maria Child, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick come to mind from the 1790s-1840s in the US. Eliza Leslie’s humorous fiction from the 1830s and 40s was a real surprise to me. Lots of women in the US from the 1850s onward…Thanks for asking, Anne!
Eliza Leslie made most of her money and fame from cookbooks and household manuela. But she started with prize-winning humor for Godey’s and then became one of its editors.
I spent my childhood reading 19th-century women writers: Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.M. Montgomery (who, yes, lived into the 20th century), Louisa May Alcott, among others. In college and grad school, I read Austen, Eliot (I wrote my senior thesis on The Mill on the Floss), the Brontes (all of them), Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Shelley, Mrs. Radcliffe, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton. My unfinished doctoral dissertation was on the adult novels of Alcott, particularly Moods. But when I taught literature to high school students, the only 19th-century women I taught were Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley, and Emily Bronte. This kind of horrifies me as I look back. I taught a lot of 20th-century women writers (Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, many poets), but almost no women writers previous to the early 20th-century. Now, in retirement, I find I reread all of Austen every year, and have dipped back into Wharton, but for the most part I have fallen out of the habit of reading 19th-century women writers.
I think Wharton would. Or at least I like Summer, which I had never read before. But there is something about the heartbreak in her novels which I sort of can't face in my old age! Give me Austen's sunny endings.
Edith Wharton is one of my all-time favorite writers--early 20th c but her topics are late 19th c. Mary Shelley is another great early writer. Otherwise, I haven't found--not that I've made a great effort--many pre-1800s writers who I like/can connect with (sorry, Austen fans!). Please keep sharing the names of your favorites!
Good morning 🙂 I hope to share my enthusiasm for these English pre-C19th literary proto-moderns and moderns of the female sex in due course—Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and a whole host of lesser-know “scribbler” novelists and pamphleteers whose output I’m only starting to catch up on (spoiler: I cannot hope to ever fully “catch up”, only clutch at a few bright fragments as they whizz past in time’s waterfall)
Lovely image! Yes, there are too many to adequately get to know them all. It’s important to me that people know that. There often seems to be an assumption, still, that they were few and far between.
🙏🏻 Hard agree—it’s that assumption of rarity that deserves to be knocked down by restoring the many, many names of the ‘forgotten’ (good writers who posthumously lost out to the institutional reflex whereby ‘Canon’ reflects male prerogatives)
Catching up on your posts and this one really resonates as I have just finished reading Jane Eyre's Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine's Story by Jody Gentian Bower. It made me want to go back and re-read all the 19th century women writers that I read in high school and college. And I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never read any George Eliot. Although I became fascinated with her life after reading Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives. There is a new biography of Eliot just published. George Eliot: Whole Soul by Ilana Blumberg. I think Middlemarch will go on my summer reading list!
What a great idea! I hadn’t heard about the new biography. I love the subtitle. I need to look for that.
I enjoy 19th and early-mid 20th c. Women
Writers equally, but my favorites are Austen,
the Brontes and Wharton. I wonder how many have read Elizabeth Stoddard’s 1862 novel The Morgesons. Quite unconventional.
Yes, I loved The Morgesons when I first read it in grad school! I discuss Stoddard at length in my first book, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. I’d love to return to Stoddard again sometime. It’s been a while!
To answer your question, Anne, I do like 19th century authors and have read a handful of the most well-known, some of them listed here, but in truth, I gravitate toward 20th and 21st century women writers. That said, I'd like to read more 19th century writers. There are just so many novels to compete for one's attention these days. That's where letters like yours are so helpful in pointing us toward writers and titles that are worthy of investigation.
Yes, there are so many! And I’ve been enjoying discovering all of the women of the 20th century. (My research for 30 years was in American women writers of the 19th.)
I was on a huge early modern kick earlier last year, reading Margaret Cavendish, Mary Sidney's translations (gorgeous), Louise Labé, Laura Cereta. And then love Fanny Burney's Evalina (I wish someone would make a movie of it, it sparkles and Burney was a huge influence on Austen). Also Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgworth (Louise May Alcott's mom read all of Edgeworth to her girls) and on to nineteenth c. with Gail Hamilton, Fanny Fern, and especially Frances Ellen Watkins Harper--amazing stuff. And recently learned of Kate Field, who was a prolific journalist, editor in the nineteenth century, known for her wit and who rivalled Mark Twain during their lifetimes. I've been obsessed with this question the last few years when I realized how many women were writing at the same time as Dickinson, e.g. and then started looking backward and wow--women have always been writing. Wish so many more people knew their names and their work.
I love Fanny Fern. Her novel Ruth Hall is so great!
So well put, Freya! There are so many riches to be discovered, if only we would look. Thank you for this impressive list! My research has been on American women writers. I’m still getting to know the many early British women writers.
LOVE Fanny Fern, saucy and smart and earning highest for awhile in 1850s, I think. Also Harper-- so important for the equity movements toward the 20th c. My students were always flabbergasted to see (fictional) enslaved people in Iola Leroy having whole active lives to themselves, agency, and community. Her poetry is amazing, too! I should check out Gail Hamilton.
So great--can't believe how many women were the most popular during their day and are completely forgotten--and how prolific they were! Harper is so important and powerful. Love that.
What a fascinating question, and wonderful responses.
The question caused some soul-searching at my end: it caused a kind of internal tour of the pre-20th C writers whom I've read, on the one hand, and whose texts I regularly revisit (even if only mentally) on the other. It turns out that distressingly few of them are women.
In the second category (the ones whose texts I regularly revisit), several are people who are best known as children's books writers today, even if the books weren't considered children's books at the time: Edith Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett (though they barely meet the criteria since most of their output was after the turn of the century), and Louisa May Alcott. Other 19th century people are Jane Austen and Christina Rossetti (but she's really only for a single poem, which I happened to encounter in a broad-reaching poetry anthology). (Edited to add Emily Dickinson.)
Even in the first category, which is basically just people one has read and remembers well enough, even if one doesn't revisit their work often, the list is small! How upsetting. There's Mme de La Fayette ("La Princesse de Clèves), and d'Aulnoy (fairy tales), and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Phillis Wheatley and a pre-revolutionary poet whose name I've forgotten (yikes).
The Brontes, Georges Sand (but have I ever really read her, as opposed to about her?), George Eliot. I forgot about Edith Wharton and Mary Shelley until others mentioned them here.
I was fascinated by the letters between Jane Carlyle and her husband Thomas, but that's not the same.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Hopefully more names will come to mind on further thought!
There are quite a few here, in spite of your regret. I’ve been dipping into a recent biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It’s fascinating how much the author uncovered, digging under generations of misperception and neglect.
There really aren’t. I mean, if you had asked about pre-20c writers in general I’d have laughed and moved on, because that’s too much to tally.
But you ask about women specifically, and it boils down to a couple of handfuls of names. It’s genuinely disturbing. A thought-provoking question in many ways.
I’m hoping that this is just the spur-of-the-moment answer and that out from under the pressure of replying, more names will come to mind. (I guess the list would be longer already if one included letter-writers etc who are known for other reasons. )
Interesting about Browning!
*disturbing — maybe “eye-opening” is better. In any case, thanks for making one think!
Happy to do so!! :)
What a great question! I'm a literary historian whose interests have moved from modernism back to the late18th/early 19th century. Two readable favorites are Rebecca Rush's novel Kelroy and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette.
And these women's lives are often just as fascinating as their books--or even more so.
I'm currently writing an intimate biography of three such audacious women writers, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, and Susanna Rowson, called The Muses of Massachusetts. All three grew up in Massachusetts on the eve of revolution; all three—a feminist, a socialite, and an actress—helped to transform Boston from a Puritan town to the "Metropolis of Massachusetts." Whenever I talk about these women, the response is—how have we never heard of them before? In a moment when women's voices and rights are being eliminated, it seems critical to tell the story of three women who dared to become public figures but whose lives and work have been written out of the stories we tell about our nation's beginnings.
Hi Betsy—This sounds like a wonderful project! I don’t know Morton, so I look forward to being enlightened! Have you published any shorter pieces about these three?
Hi Anne and all--
Thanks for your comments!
I haven't published/written about all three together--only individually and in academic venues. Sarah Wentworth Morton is the least well-known today but was a prolific poet, saloniste,and patron of the theater. If you know her at all, it's as the betrayed wife--whose husband has a child with her sister--in William Hill Brown's novel The Power of Sympathy. That was based on a real life scandal that, sadly, ended in Sarah's sister's (Fanny Apthorp) suicide. There was a public trial, and Sarah's husband, Perez Morton, was found not responsible for Fanny's death. John Adams told Sarah she should forgive her husband, but I am not sure she ever did. But there is so much more to her than this!
I got interested in them as a group when I learned that their lives came together at the Federal Street Theatre, the first theater in Boston--Sarah as a patron (and part owner), Judith as a playwright, and Susanna as an actress.
So glad to have a chance to share this with others!
What a convergence! And what a sad affair Sarah Morton endured. Sounds like you have a great story, Betsy!
Sounds like a fascinating biography.
I love Judith Sargent Murray--I have the same feeling over and over--how have we not heard of these amazing feminist women? (ha, rhetorical I know very well why.... grrrr.)
I love her too! I teach her in my Gender and Rhetoric class and students are always blown away by her.
Said it before but Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is the finest 19th century novel by either sex. It leaps off the page
It’s been a long time since I’ve read it. It’s a shame that its reputation has been buried under layers of contemptuous criticism—for sentimentalism and racism. It definitely deserves to be more widely read and understood.
Reading the comments is illuminating. A moment of revelation for me as I hardly know of women writers from this era, except perhaps by name.
Wonderful, Jill! I hope you feel inspired to read some of them.
Yes, thanks to you and your readers I have a list. And after reading Willa Cather's My Antonia last month with Josh Dolezal here on Substack, I am ready to roll back time even further and dive into other overlooked treasures.
I look forward to hearing what you discover!
I grew up on Little House on the Prairie (books and TV series with Melissa Gilbert and Michael Landon). I think this predisposed me early for the 19th century. In grad school, I sampled a variety of periods but 19th-c. American and British women writers were hands-down my calling. Since mulling over the lovely post on Woolson, I wondered if you might sometime post on Harriet Prescott Spofford? I've been watching Sherlock lately and thinking how women writers of early detection narratives are entirely overlooked, too. Thanks for creating this community around women writers, past and present! A lot of writers mentioned in other comments are favorites, also! I love finding more obscure women writers, too-- often in anthology or monographs!
Hi Sarah—Spofford is interesting. I looked into her career when I was writing my first book, Writing for Immortality. But I didn’t focus on her. (My four figures were Woolson, Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Elizabeth Stoddard.). I’ve been thinking I should write about Stoddard. She was definitely audacious! Do you think Spofford was as well?
I'd love to hear your latest thoughts about Stoddard! She's my #1 favorite American writer from the 19th c. Base in part on your Writing for Immortality, I devoted a whole dissertation chapter to The Morgesons (alongside her column in the Daily Alta California, excavated from microfiche!). While knowing probably a little too much about Stoddard's life, I don't know anything about Spofford's - I've taught "Circumstance" and the first Mr. Furbush story ("In the Maguerriwock"), but I know little about her life. In the back of my brain, I'm thinking an alcoholic husband and the need to earn the family's income figures in, but I could be confusing her with others because that was so true of so many women writers in 19th-c. America. I would love to learn more about her life and oeuvre, if you are game!
Yes, sadly, so true! I looked into Spofford’s career at the Atlantic Monthly, which I wrote about in an article (open access: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/engl_facpubs/23/). But I don’t know much about her life. Unfortunately my work on women writers has veered far away from Stoddard since I published my first book. (I’m delighted to hear that it inspired you to write about her as well!) I’m sure a lot of valuable scholarship has been published on her since then.
Thanks for sharing your article on Woolson!
Oops, I meant, thanks for sharing your Spofford article 😀
Harriet Prescott Spofford is so interesting, and was hugely popular and influenced Dickinson's writing in many ways. I'd love to see her become more widely known too.
Wow--I didn't know that she influenced Dickinson! But I can imagine it. "Circumstance" is certainly a memorable story, casting a female in a sensational role and giving her an ingenious way out-- brain and voice saving the day.
She wrote to her sister in law Susan after reading Circumstance: "Dear S.: That is the only thing I ever saw in my life I did not think I could have written myself. You stand nearer the world than I do. Send me everything she writes." Ha, I love Dickinson's arrogance and wit. But I read that some scholars believe that one of Spofford's stories, where it's revealed at the end the narrator is dead, may have inspired a lot of Dickinson's poems where the speaker is already dead, etc.
Ah! That is fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I recommend visiting Dickinson's house in Amherst\, if you haven't already. This thread is making me admire the strong representation of women writers in the frontier-adventure genre, too!
I actually got to do a pilgrimage to her home last summer and spent an hour in her room writing--I'll never forget it. Such an amazing place, to think of the steps that have crossed that threshold over the decades. 💜
How wonderful that you were able to stay there are write for a while! I was there in 2018 with my mother and daughter. It was very moving.
Besides Edith Wharton, whom I adore, my favorite 19th century American women writers are the short story writers Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. The label "local color" trivializes their accomplishments. If you don't know Freeman's work, start with her short story, "A New England Nun." That and "The Revolt of Mother" are her best-known stories.
So glad you mentioned Sarah Orne Jewett! I love her stories and style. I’ve read The White Heron (haunting) and The Country of Pointed Firs. I was so enamored by the latter that I sought out a first edition and keep it on a special shelf. Another writer from the late 1800s who is rarely mentioned is Ellen Glasgow from Richmond, Virginia: she wrote about the South after Reconstruction (although I only ever read her autobiography, which I loved). Have a copy of that too. I’d like to return to reading both of these remarkable women.
I love “The Revolt of Mother”! An all-time favorite. Freeman is definitely one of my tops as well.
In retirement I will return to recovering Danske Dandridge. Here’s the Wikipedia page. Her papers are at the WVU Libraries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Dandridge
Interesting! It seems her husband encouraged her writing. That’s nice to see, for a change!
I'm in several book clubs to pull me OUT of the nineteenth century. Otherwise, I'd be there entirely, mostly with Grace King's letters and writings and with secondary sources about the period. Oh, yeah.
Ha! You do live there these days, don’t you. As I once did as well. It’s been a real pleasure to return there lately with Woolson.
I gravitate to earlier women, 18th and 19th century, but also if enough is known, early modern. I have a blog series I call foremother poets, and you can reach some of them here. I have favorites among the 19th century novelists, Anne Bronte's two novels, Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and less well known women and have written essay & reviews of books, and yet more blogs:
https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/
I spent a long time with Anne Finch and Charlotte Smith translated two Italian Renaissance women poets
http://www.jimandellen.org/ellen/emschol.htm
I've been reading Dorothy Sayers recently. I've never stopped reading Austen or about her since I was 13. I often love Virago books, especially with the green frames.
I have trouble understanding Liber: the tones, idiolects and assumptions puzzle me.
Ellen
I've been reading several group bios of women, and Dorothy Sayers is featured in two: Mo Moulton's Mutual Admiration Society and Francesca Wade's Square Haunting. Both great reads!
I agree. I liked The Mutual Admiration Society so much, T erote a blog-review
https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2024/05/30/mo-moultons-the-mutual-admiration-society/
Wade is remarably insightful and clear and concise.
Ellen, re Dorothy Sayers you might be interested in this exchange in Notes!
https://substack.com/profile/9335-jeremy-noel-tod/note/c-58073446
What a great resource your blog can be for those looking for pre-20th-century women writers!
You make a great point. I'm immersed in the early to mid 20th century female writers but have a kind of block about 19th century women writers. I have struggled in the past with Edith Wharton and Hodgson-Burnett and think that has maybe put me off...would love some recommendations-apart from the obvious 19th century (and previous) classics.
I hope you find lots here to pique your interest!
Too many to list, of course!!! But Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Lydia Maria Child, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick come to mind from the 1790s-1840s in the US. Eliza Leslie’s humorous fiction from the 1830s and 40s was a real surprise to me. Lots of women in the US from the 1850s onward…Thanks for asking, Anne!
I don’t know Eliza Leslie’s work. I studied the others, of course, but haven’t read them in years.
Eliza Leslie made most of her money and fame from cookbooks and household manuela. But she started with prize-winning humor for Godey’s and then became one of its editors.
I spent my childhood reading 19th-century women writers: Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.M. Montgomery (who, yes, lived into the 20th century), Louisa May Alcott, among others. In college and grad school, I read Austen, Eliot (I wrote my senior thesis on The Mill on the Floss), the Brontes (all of them), Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Shelley, Mrs. Radcliffe, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton. My unfinished doctoral dissertation was on the adult novels of Alcott, particularly Moods. But when I taught literature to high school students, the only 19th-century women I taught were Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley, and Emily Bronte. This kind of horrifies me as I look back. I taught a lot of 20th-century women writers (Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, many poets), but almost no women writers previous to the early 20th-century. Now, in retirement, I find I reread all of Austen every year, and have dipped back into Wharton, but for the most part I have fallen out of the habit of reading 19th-century women writers.
Austen is eminently re-readable! I wonder if Wharton, Chopin, and the others would interest you again as they once did.
I think Wharton would. Or at least I like Summer, which I had never read before. But there is something about the heartbreak in her novels which I sort of can't face in my old age! Give me Austen's sunny endings.
Have you read her short stories and her other writing? Wharton’s works span a lot—from ghost stories to travel writing.
(Her story Roman Fever is especially fun.)
Edith Wharton is one of my all-time favorite writers--early 20th c but her topics are late 19th c. Mary Shelley is another great early writer. Otherwise, I haven't found--not that I've made a great effort--many pre-1800s writers who I like/can connect with (sorry, Austen fans!). Please keep sharing the names of your favorites!
Read Eliza Haywood’s ‘Fantomina’ recently - v interesting on sexuality and pregnancy
Wow! I just read the plot summary on Wikipedia. Astonishing for a woman to have written, and claimed. I hadn’t heard of it before.
It’s a pretty quick read and is online here: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/haywood/fantomina/fantomina.html
Good morning 🙂 I hope to share my enthusiasm for these English pre-C19th literary proto-moderns and moderns of the female sex in due course—Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and a whole host of lesser-know “scribbler” novelists and pamphleteers whose output I’m only starting to catch up on (spoiler: I cannot hope to ever fully “catch up”, only clutch at a few bright fragments as they whizz past in time’s waterfall)
Lovely image! Yes, there are too many to adequately get to know them all. It’s important to me that people know that. There often seems to be an assumption, still, that they were few and far between.
🙏🏻 Hard agree—it’s that assumption of rarity that deserves to be knocked down by restoring the many, many names of the ‘forgotten’ (good writers who posthumously lost out to the institutional reflex whereby ‘Canon’ reflects male prerogatives)