Books in the American Women Writers series

Brings together for the first time a variety of Louisa May Alcott's journalistic, satiric, feminist, and sensation texts. Elaine Showalter has provided an excellent introduction and notes to the collection.

A widely held vision of nineteenth-century American women is of lives lived in naive, domestic peace - the girls of Little Women. Nothing could be less true of Harriet Prescott Spofford's stories. In fact, her editor at the Atlantic Monthly at first refused to believe that an unworldly woman from New England had written them.

The leading feminist intellectual of her day, Margaret Fuller is remembered for her groundbreaking work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which recharted the gender roles of men and women. In this collection, the full range of her literary career is represented from her earliest poetry to her final dispatch from revolutionary Italy.