Books in the Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers series

In 1871 Jennie Collins became one of the first working-class American women to publish a volume of her own writings: Nature's Aristocracy. Merging autobiography, social criticism, fictionalized vignettes, and feminist polemics, her book examines the perennial problem of class in America.

Following in the path of her distinguished Puritan forebears, Hannah Mather Crocker used her skills as a writer primarily to persuade. Unlike those forebears, however, she did not begin her career as a published writer until well into middle age. The works collected here include previously unpublished poetry, drama, memoirs, sermons, and essays on American identity, education, and history.

Collects all of Brown's writings, consisting of letters and a diary, some appearing in print for the first time, as well as Brown's biography and a drama and poems about her.

Written in the 1840s and published here for the first time, Julia Ward Howe's novel about a hermaphrodite is unlike anything of its time or, in truth, of our own. This story is unique in nineteenth-century American letters, at once a remarkable reflection of a largely hidden inner life and a richly imagined tale of coming-of-age at odds with one's culture.

Sukey Vickery's Emily Hamilton is an epistolary novel dealing with the courtship and marriages of three women. Originally published in 1803, it is one of the earliest examples of realist fiction in America and a departure from other novels at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Suffragist, lecturer, eugenicist, businesswoman, free lover, and the first woman to run for president of the United States, Victoria C. Woodhull (1838-1927) has been all but forgotten as a leading nineteenth-century feminist writer and radical. Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull is the first multigenre, multisubject collection of her writings.

A novel which tracks the fortunes of Jason Auster and his unlikely bride, the aristocratic Sarah Parke, along with the children and wards, the lost loves and secret passions that define and forever alter an entire family and everyone who touches it. It illuminates the racial, sexual, and political conventions and conflicts of its time.

A nineteenth-century radical women's rights novel that tells the story of a young woman's efforts to earn respect and autonomy as a women's rights lecturer

Tells the story of contact between a late-nineteenth-century Tennessee mountain community and an amateur archaeologist who wants to open the graves of the prehistoric "leetle stranger people," a source of myth to the mountaineers.

Best known for her culinary and domestic guides and the award-winning short story ""Mrs. Washington Potts"", Eliza Leslie deserves a much more prominent place in contemporary literary discussions of the nineteenth century. This volume enables readers to see how Leslie's rhetoric and audience awareness facilitated her ability to appeal to a broad swath of the nineteenth-century reading public.

The practice of plural marriage, commonly known as polygamy, stirred intense controversy in postbellum America until 1890, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints first officially abolished the practice. Elder Northfield's Home, published in 1882, is both a staunchly anti-polygamy novel and a call for the sentimental repatriation of polygamy's victims.

The well-educated daughter of a minister, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911) was introduced to writing at a young age, as both her mother and father were published writers. This book seeks to restore Phelps' reputation by bringing together a diverse collection from the entire body of her lifetime of work.

A scathing critique of the legal status of women and their property rights in nineteenth-century America, Rebecca Harding Davis''s 1878 novel A Law Unto Herself chronicles the experiences of Jane Swendon, a seemingly naïve and conventional nineteenth-century protagonist struggling to care for her elderly father with limited financial resources. In order to continue care, Jane seeks to secure her rightful inheritance despite the efforts of her cousin and later her husband, a greedy man who has tricked her father into securing her hand in marriage.Appealing to middle-class literary tastes of the age, A Law Unto Herself elucidated for a broad general audience the need for legal reforms regarding divorce, mental illness, inheritance, and reforms to the Married Women''s Property Laws. Through three fascinating female characters, the novel also invites readers to consider evolving gender roles during a time of cultural change.Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) built a career spanning nearly half a century from her apprenticeship newspaper work for the Wheeling (WV) Intelligencer in the 1850s to her last published short story at the time of her death. She is best known for the publication of her novella Life in the Iron-Mills (1861) in the Atlantic Monthly.Alicia Mischa Renfroe is an associate professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University.