Books in the American Women Writers series

Hope Leslie (1827), set in the seventeenth-century New England, is a novel that forced readers to confront the consequences of the Puritansi?1/2 subjugation and displacement of the indigenous Indian population at a time when contemporaries were demanding still more land from the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, and the Choctaws.

Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times is the provocative story of an upperclass white woman who marries an Indian chief, has a child, then leaves him - with the child - for another man. This novel, originally published in 1824, is a powerful first among antipatriarchal and antiracist novels in American literature.

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.

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.

E.D.E.N. Southworth was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the nineteenth century and her Capitola Black, or Black Cap - a cross-dressing, adventure-seeking girl-woman - was so well-loved that the book was serialized three times between 1859 and 1888 and was dramatized in forty different versions.  There are bandits, true-loves, evil men, long-lost mothers, and sweet women friends in Capitola's future - not to mention thunder storms, kidnap attempts, and duels. The pace is fast, the action wonderfully unbelievable. This is escape literature at its nineteenth-century best, with a woman at its center who makes you feel strong, daring, and reckless.

Fanny Fern was one of the most popular American writers of the mid-nineteenth century, the first woman newspaper columnist in the United States, and the most highly paid newspaper writer of her day. This volume gathers together for the first time almost one hundred selections of her best work as a journalist.