Kindred Hands

Contents

Download PDF (46.3 KB)
pp. v-vi

Introduction

Download PDF (130.9 KB)
pp. 1-19

Letters are, by definition, common artifacts. Their contents capture the transitory, finite experience of the everyday — the private expression and connection that, historically, has delimited both British and American women’s lives. The letters contained in this collection exemplify a world dependent upon epistolary communication. However, while these letters are in some ways prototypic ...

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896)

Download PDF (153.3 KB)
pp. 21-41

That Harriet Beecher Stowe would become, at age forty, the best-known and best-paid author of nineteenth-century America was, in part, the accident of having been born and raised in antebellum New England — a time and a place in which women writers dominated the American literary scene. The seventh child of Roxana Foote Beecher and Lyman Beecher, Stowe was born in Litchfield, ...

2. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825 - 1911)

Download PDF (107.7 KB)
pp. 43-57

Frances E. W. Harper’s professional reputation was first established as an abolitionist lecturer and writer. Her poetry and prose appeared regularly in antislavery publications such as the North Star, the Liberator, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, the Provincial Freeman, and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. William Still verifies her prominence in that movement by devoting an entire chapter of his ...

3. Rebecca Harding Davis (1831 - 1910)

Download PDF (98.3 KB)
pp. 59-70

Although born in a small town in Alabama, Rebecca Harding Davis lived in Wheeling, (West) Virginia, from the age of six until her marriage to L. Clarke Davis in 1863, settling thereafter in Philadelphia. It was the environment of Wheeling, a cotton and iron manufactory town, which gave Davis the background for her most famous story, “Life in the Iron-Mills” (1861). Considered ...

4. Mary Abigail Dodge [Gail Hamilton] (1833 - 1896)

Download PDF (119.7 KB)
pp. 71-86

Mary Abigail Dodge, who published under the name Gail Hamilton, was a well-known essayist, editor, and humorist who could best be described, in Judith Fetterley’s words, as a “cultural critic-at-large” (424). She is now primarily remembered for her protofeminist essays, most notably those collected in Country Living and Country Thinking (1862) and Woman’s Wrongs: A Counter-Irritant ...

5. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835 - 1915)

Download PDF (124.2 KB)
pp. 87-105

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the nineteenth century, though she was also one of the most controversial. In 1865 Henry James crowned Braddon “the founder of the sensation novel,” a title that brought with it more ridicule than accolades.¹ Sensation novels were a genre of fiction that exposed the lurid underbelly of Victorian middle-class ...

6. Mary Cholmondeley (1859 - 1925) and Rhoda Broughton (1840 - 1920)

Download PDF (100.2 KB)
pp. 107-119

Mary Cholmondeley and Rhoda Broughton were both daughters of Anglican clergyman. Both grew up and spent their early adult lives in isolated parsonages on the northern English-Welsh border (Broughton in Cheshire and Staffordshire, Cholmondeley in Shropshire); both moved in overlapping circles of the country gentry, though as children of impoverished “younger sons” rather ...

7. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844 - 1911)

Download PDF (132.8 KB)
pp. 121-132

In her autobiography, Chapters from a Life (1896), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps claimed that she was destined for a literary life. Born Mary Gray Phelps on 31 August 1844, she entered a Boston family of accomplished writers. When Phelps was four years old, her father was appointed Professor of Rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. Before him there were ministerial ancestors accustomed to writing and publishing their sermons. ...

8. Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison [Lucas Malet] (1852 - 1931)

Download PDF (106.3 KB)
pp. 133-146

Lucas Malet (Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison), remarkable for her literary productivity, wrote seventeen successful novels, several essays, and short stories. Her most important works are The Wages of Sin (1891), The Gateless Barrier (1900), The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901), The Far Horizon (1906), Adrian Savage (1911), The Survivors (1923), and The Dogs of Want (1924). Two ...

9. Henrietta Stannard, Mari Corelli and Annesley Kenealy (1855 - 1924)

Download PDF (115.6 KB)
pp. 147-162

The Society of Authors, founded in 1884 by Walter Besant, was the first organization to advocate fair practices in the literary marketplace with regard to copyright and pay for the numerous authors writing in a developing industry. Through a variety of social and professional activities and its monthly journal, the Author, the Society became a major force in public discussion of authorship ...

10. Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright [George Egerton] (1859 - 1945)

Download PDF (158.3 KB)
pp. 163-177

Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright [George Egerton] seems today to be almost a caricature of the now familiar figure of the short-lived, though profoundly influential, New Woman of the late nineteenth century. Irish, unconventional, and sexually independent, Egerton personified the outsider among English literati — and, indeed, she seemed to cultivate this status. Born Chavelita Dunne to an ...

11. Rosamund Marriott Watson [Graham R. Tomson] (1860 - 1911)

Download PDF (105.2 KB)
pp. 179-191

Born Rosamond Ball in 1860, the poet and woman of letters known as Graham R. Tomson from 1887 to 1894, then as Rosamund Marriott Watson until her death in 1911, was a significant figure among New Woman poets and female aesthetes in fin-de-si�cle London.� She broke into the influential circle of Andrew Lang in 1887 thanks to talent and a pseudonym borrowed to shield her elopement ...

12. Palma Pederson (1879 - 1950)

Download PDF (160.8 KB)
pp. 193-216

The early life of Palma Pederson¹ — or Palma, her nom de plume and preferred designation in her letters — resembles the plot of one of her own novels.² Born on 18 November 1879 in the coastal town of Porsgrund, Norway, Palma was the youngest of nine children and the only daughter of Per and Marie Anderson. Palma’s father was a tailor who, due to drinking, suffered severe financial losses. ...

13. Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 - 1961)

Download PDF (131.9 KB)
pp. 217-234

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was an essayist, short-story writer, novelist, and literary editor for the Crisis. She is remembered for her second novel Plum Bun (1928), which highlights the complex relationship between race and sex for an African-American woman artist. Such a focus is significant given Fauset’s own position during the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro ...

Contributors

Download PDF (50.3 KB)
pp. 235-237

Index

Download PDF (69.2 KB)
pp. 239-247