"A New Era in Female History": Ninteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers

The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature . By Marianne Noble. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2000. 240 pp. Cloth, $57.50; paper, $19.95.

Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature . By Lori Merish. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 1999. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $21.95.

Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women . By Joycelyn Moody. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 2001. 216 pp. $40.00.

Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture . By Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2002. 480 pp. $44.95.

To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells . By Linda O. McMurry. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 1998. 416 pp. Paper, $18.95.

Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe . By Gary Williams. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press. 1999. 288 pp. $34.95.

Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization . Ed. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 2000. 320 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $25.00.

Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War . By Elizabeth Young. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 1999. xvi, 389 pp. Cloth, $47.00; paper, $18.00.

Karen Pelletier has been granted $10 million to establish a Center for the Study of American Women Writers. Would that it were true. Pelletier is the protagonist in Joanne Dobson's series of mysteries about an assistant professor of English specializing in nineteenth-century women writers. Because Dobson is a well-established scholar in the field of nineteenth-century literary recovery and reassessment, the mysteries have a rare degree of honesty in their portrayal of academics and the consequences of recovering "lost" texts (well, murder may be extreme, but otherwise she is, shall we say, dead on about the field). You know a field of study has come into its own when it has a mystery series built around it. Ever since I read the first book in the series, I have pondered the idea of what we might accomplish if we had an Omohundro or Schomburg institute backing research specific to nineteenth-century women writers and culture. Considering the extraordinary ways in which the Schomburg series in nineteenth-century black women writers has reshaped the field, it whets one's appetite for broad institutional support to focus on research that builds on that illustrious beginning—and, indeed, it is yet only a beginning, in spite of how far we have advanced.

Nineteenth-century American women writers is an area of scholarship that has moved from the margins to become one of the premier fields in nineteenth-century studies. This advancement has been accomplished through the efforts of scholars who continue to expand the boundaries of intellectual thought. The field has progressed from the necessary process of recovery that began in earnest in the 1970s, to critical analyses that have reshaped our understanding of nineteenth-century U.S. literatures and cultures, to reassessments that have established new parameters of interpretation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, several creative and sure-to-be influential texts have been published that suggest just how advanced scholarship on nineteenth-century U.S. women writers has become and—equally important—areas in which scholarship needs yet to develop more fully. Let me emphasize this thesis before I move on to a review of the state of the field. This tripartite process of recovery, critical assessment, and significant reassessments of the field based on that recovery and critical analysis is not a minor point, and it is not necessarily a linear process. Recovery in and of itself holds little value. It was important when Tillie Olsen recovered Rebecca Harding Davis's pioneering realistic narrative, "Life in the Iron-Mills," and it certainly was important when the texts of Sui Sin Far, Elizabeth Keckley, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton were added to the...