Private woman, public stage; literacy domesticity in nineteenth-century America
By: Mary Kelley. --
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1984
Place of publication: New York
Number of pages: 409
Subjects: Popular literature -- United States -- History and criticism; Women -- United States -- Books and reading; Women -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Women authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography
Genres: Books and reading.
Description: "In the decades spanning the nineteenth century, thousands of women entered the literary marketplace. Twelve of the century's most successful women writers provide the focus for Mary Kelley's landmark study: Maria Cummins, Caroline Howard Gilman, Caroline Lee Hentz, Mary Jane Holmes, Maria McIntosh, Sara Parton, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Virginia Terhune, Susan Warner, and Augusta Evans Wilson. These women shared more than commercial success. Collectively they created fictions that Kelley terms "literary domesticity," books that both embraced and called into question the complicated expectations shaping the lives of so many nineteenth-century women. Matured in a culture of domesticity and dismissed by a male writing establishment, they struggled to reconcile public recognition with the traditional roles of wife and mother. Drawing on the 200 volumes of published prose and on the letters, diaries, and journals of these writers, Kelley explores the tensions that accompanied their unprecedented literary success."--Google Books (re: new edition).
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

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