An annotated bibliography on women who wrote fiction in the US during the period 1790-1870. The first part is an annotated list of sources that discuss women's fiction in the period and women authors born before 1840 who published before 1870. The second part is an alphabetical list of the approximately 325 19th century writers who meet those criteria. There are indexes by pseudonym, editor, and subject. The sources provide information not only about the individual authors but also about the history of criticism and literary politics, especially women's place in the American literary canon.

An annotated bibliography on women who wrote fiction in the US during the period 1790-1870. The first part is an annotated list of sources that discuss women's fiction in the period and women authors born before 1840 who published before 1870. The second part is an alphabetical list of the approximately 325 19th century writers who meet those criteria. There are indexes by pseudonym, editor, and subject. The sources provide information not only about the individual authors but also about the history of criticism and literary politics, especially women's place in the American literary canon.

This reissue of the pioneering and standard book on antebellum women's domestic novels contains a new introduction situating the book in the context of important recent developments in the study of women's writing. Nina Baym considers 130 novels by 48 women, focusing on the works of a dozen especially productive and successful writers. Woman's Fiction is a major-work in nineteenth-century literature, reexamining changes in the literary canon and the meaning of sentimentalism, while responding to current critical discussions of 'the body' in literary texts. ''Informative and stimulating. . . . Nina Baym has undertaken a systematic analysis of that nineteenth-century American fiction normally dismissed as at best trivially sentimental. . . . Woman's Fiction offers a fresh perspective on a largely forgotten body of literature.'' -- American Literature''Perceives in the fiction of, by, and for women in the period stated a popular genre that made a particular kind of feminist avowal for the times, one that rejected the concept of helplessness and urged the application of intelligence and courage to trying situations. . . . Baym marshals ample supporting evidence from the outpouring of such fiction.'' - ALA Booklist

Provides profiles of early American women writers, offers selections from their novels, and gathers selected criticism.

Just as she helped launch the rediscovery of literary texts by American women writers, Nina Baym now uncovers the work of history performed by over 150 writers in over 350 texts. Here she explores a world of important writing unknown even to most specialists. The novels, poems, plays, textbooks, and travel narratives written by women between 1790 and the Civil War defy current theories of women's writing that stress a female domain of the private, homebound, and emotional. History is inarguably public in its nature and these women wrote it. In doing so, they challenged the imaginative and intellectual boundaries that divided domestic and public worlds. They claimed on behalf of all women the rights to know and to speak about the world outside the home, as well as to circulate their knowledge and opinions among the public. Their work helped shape the enormous public interest in history characteristic of the antebellum nation, and ultimately to forge our national identity in the history of the world. Nina Baym deftly outlines the master narrative of history implied in women's writings of this period, and discusses in a completely revisioned context the emergence of women's history in public discourse.

This volume is a comprehensive and transatlantic literary study of women’s nineteenth-and-twentieth-century fiction. Firstly, it introduces and explores the concept of women’s affective labour, and examines literary representations of this work in British and American fiction written by women between 1848 and 1915. Secondly, it revives largely ignored texts by the “scribbling women” of Britain and America, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mona Caird, and Mary Hunter Austin, and rereads established authors, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton, to demonstrate how all these works provide valuable insights into women’s lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, by adopting the lens of affective labour, the study explores the ways in which women were portrayed as striving for self-fulfilment through forms of emotional, mental, and creative endeavours that have not always been fully appreciated as ‘work’ in critical accounts of nineteenth-and-twentieth-century fiction.