Reclaiming Authorship
Literary Women in America, 185-19

Susan S. Williams (Author)

9780812239423

Hardback, published 13 June 2006

264 pages, 17 illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.666 kg

"Reclaiming Authorship augments our knowledge of the female literary tradition and enriches our grasp of the process by which women authors sought public status in a literary publishing marketplace which was (and remains) customarily considered to be a masculine realm. It challenges, moreover, basic tenets of the origins of realism and does so by positing a definable historical transition from the romantic and sentimental to the realist." (Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University)

There was, in the nineteenth century, a distinction made between "writers" and "authors," Susan S. Williams notes, the former defined as those who composed primarily from mere experience or observation rather than from the unique genius or imagination of the latter. If women were more often cast as writers than authors by the literary establishment, there also emerged in magazines, advice books, fictional accounts, and letters a specific model of female authorship, one that valorized "natural" feminine traits such as observation and emphasis on detail, while also representing the distance between amateur writing and professional authorship.
Attending to biographical and cultural contexts and offering fresh readings of literary works, Reclaiming Authorship focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put this model of female authorship into practice. Williams shows how it sometimes intersected with prevailing notions of male authorship and sometimes diverged from them, and how it is often precisely those moments of divergence when authorship was reclaimed by women.
The current trend to examine "women writers" rather than "authors" marks a full rotation of the circle, and "writers" can indeed be the more capacious term, embracing producers of everything from letters and diaries to published books. Yet certain nineteenth-century women made particular efforts to claim the title "author," Williams demonstrates, and we miss something of significance by ignoring their efforts.

Preface
Chapter 1. Defining Female Authorship
Chapter 2. Writing in and out of the Home: Parlor Culture and Authorship
Chapter 3. Authorizing Reception: Maria Cummins and The Lamplighter
Chapter 4. Revising Romance: Louisa May Alcott, Hawthorne, and the Civil War
Chapter 5. Contractual Authorship: Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Abigail Dodge
Chapter 6. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Ethical Authorship
Chapter 7. Epilogue: Amateurs and Professionals in Woolson and James
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments