Title: Private woman, public stage; literacy domesticity in nineteenth-century America
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).
Subjects: American Women authors, Biography, Books and reading, History, History and criticism, Popular literature, United States, Women, Women in literature, Sex role in literature, Women authors, American fiction, American Authors, American Domestic fiction, Privacy in literature, Intellectual life, Sex differences, Public opinion in literature, Women and literature, Authorship
Time periods: 19th century