Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865–1935 (review)

The publication and positive reception of two excellent recent studies— Elizabeth Hewitt’s Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 and Eve Tavor Bannet’s Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820—both published by Cambridge University Press— suggest that the field of epistolary studies is coming of age and receiving its due recognition in scholarly publishing. Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865–1935 contributes to the study of letters by recovering selected British and American women authors’ epistles that take as their subjects facets of the women’s writing lives: reading and interpretive practices, writing, authorship, publication, the literary marketplace, and relationships with editors, readers, reviewers, and other authors. As the volume’s editors, Jennifer Cognard-Black and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, assert in the introduction, the collection “underscores the centrality of letters in fostering women’s creative expression” as the authors “used letters to help create, enhance, publicize, and defend their writing” (5).

Each author’s letters are introduced by a different scholar, who provides biographical information and situates the letters within historical, cultural, and social frameworks through a headnote and annotations. Thus, Frances Smith Foster considers the difficulties of recovering the letters of African American women writers in her introduction to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s selections and, in a genre-defying inclusion, adds poetry and fictional writings to the selection of Harper’s “letters.” Referring to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s correspondence with Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Cognard-Black explains that by writing out her evaluations of Evans’s novels and characters, Stowe strove to achieve a sympathetic bond with Evans as a fellow author, while George V. Griffith demonstrates how Phelps and Evans’s correspondence reveals their common concerns with women’s health and women’s authorship.

Several of the writers’ selections foreground women’s professional negotiations within a changing nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Sharon M. Harris reveals, for example, that Rebecca Harding Davis used letters to her editors and publishers to negotiate key aspects of her works’ publication, while Susan S. Williams frames the letters Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton) exchanged with Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and other writers within the context of mid- to late-nineteenth-century legal actions arbitrating for fair compensation for authors. Kristin A. Risley details novelist Palma Pederson’s epistolary efforts to position herself within the ranks of Norwegian American intellectuals, while Kimberly J. Banks shows how Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote letters in her role as an editor that also consolidate her own relationships with other Harlem Renaissance writers. British writers in the volume include Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mary Cholmondeley, Rhoda Broughton, Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison (Lucas Malet), Henrietta Stannard, Marie Corelli, Annesley Kenealy, Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (George Egerton), and Rosamund Marriot Watson (Graham R. Tomson).

Kindred Hands makes a valuable contribution to the study of epistolary writing by putting a significant amount of women’s correspondence in readers’ hands and allowing them to make meaning of the women’s acts of letter writing and the letters themselves. Beyond this, however, and disappointingly so, the volume does not venture. The introduction provides little in the way of contextualizing or theorizing the volume’s contents in relation to recent scholarship on epistolarity, leaving this reader longing for more consideration of the opportunities or constraints the genre presented women practitioners or how these writers may have adhered to conventions, revised expectations, or experimented with the form.

Ultimately, the volume is most usefully viewed as a compendium articulating a range of women authors’ attitudes toward writing. In this, Kindred Hands offers a comprehensive and sometimes contradictory—and thus exciting and potentially generative—portrayal of the evolving phenomenon of women’s authorship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The editors’ efforts to situate the selected writings in a transatlantic context is...