Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain ed. by Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, Lucinda L. Damon Bach (review)

Transatlantic studies of English and American writing, well established as it is, becomes more complete with this offering of a range of essays on American women writers and their relationship to British authors and audiences. Individuals new to transatlantic studies will especially benefit from the brief history of the field given in the introduction, which reviews the foundational texts, anthologies, and the most recent development toward single-author studies.

The editors introduce the overall project as one that “addresses the scope and diversity of women’s nineteenth-century transatlantic literary exchanges.” The fifteen chapters model a variety of scholarly approaches, materials, and subjects—close readings of letters, private travel journals, and published works—that cover a period from 1830–1910. Thus one of the most compelling aspects of this collection is its ability to illustrate how deep, wide, and generative a project can be when editors thoughtfully curate a scholarly conversation on transatlantic interactions.

The first half of the book focuses on travel to England and travel narratives. Collectively, the chapters suggest that authors’ experience of travel often shifted between the poles of new independence and influential communities. Self-understanding and self-creation opened up in this alternative space—whether at the beginning of an authorial career for some such as Frances Osgood or at the height of celebrity for others such as Margaret Fuller. The second section suggests that authors need not literally travel to England for such a transatlantic exchange, but instead focuses on textual influence. Textual influence is handled deftly here. For example, Birgit Spengler resists Bloom’s anxiety of influence when tracing the appropriation and repurposing of Jane Eyre by Louisa May Alcott and Anna Katharine Green, who draw concerns of radicalized power down from the attic and into the center of their novels.

Scholars may be tempted to read essays related to a particular area of interest when browsing in this collection; certainly each essay is well worth the time. For example, Grace McEntee offers the compelling argument that although Harriet Jacobs’ depiction of her transatlantic experience in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is relatively brief, Jacobs’ experience of abolitionist England was an “emotional turning point in her life” that shapes the entire text and not just the single chapter. Nevertheless, the strength of the volume is accumulative as the thesis of one essay reframes the claims of another. The book had its genesis in the eponymous 2008 Transatlantic Women conference. The conference was sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Society, the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society; as such, these authors are well represented, with Stowe appearing most frequently as a central author in four essays. Although essays within the edition occasionally cite each other, and implicitly reflect the give-and-take of a live conference, the project would have benefited from more synthesis in a concluding essay.