Writing for Immortality: Women Writers and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (review)

In Writing for Immortality, Anne E. Boyd focuses on the lives, literary work, and personal and professional struggles of four authors whose careers spanned the postbellum period: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. The postbellum era was a transitional period for American women writers—a time between the enormous success of the sentimentalists and the solidification of literary writing as the exclusive realm of male artists by the end of the century. In her examination of this overlooked period, Boyd challenges the commonly held assumption that women's literature of the nineteenth century was devoted primarily to didactic fiction and that Edith Wharton was one of the first female authors who was a "serious artist" (247). Boyd successfully reconstructs the era through an examination of the historical evidence, ranging from letters, diaries, reviews, essays, and literary social events, and close readings of the fiction of Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson to demonstrate that these pioneering artists took an active role in contemporary discussions on the nature of genius and art.

In the first chapter, Boyd argues that her subjects dreamed of being regarded as serious writers and that they set their sights on the realm of high art. They rejected the assumption that they should limit their work to the middlebrow topics considered suitable for female writers. Boyd focuses on how these authors were able to conceive of themselves as artists and to forge identities as serious literary writers at a time when ambition and genius were considered antithetical to a woman's proper role in life. She argues, "[T]he democratic discourses of American genius and individualism, Transcendentalism, and European romanticism, combined with the examples of female geniuses in Europe and opportunities for literary professionalization in America, helped to create an atmosphere of potential and possibility for women writers" (15).

Though there was a new atmosphere of possibility, Boyd demonstrates that the authors' devotion to art was in conflict with the widespread assumption that marriage should be a woman's greatest achievement. In chapter two, Boyd argues that the work of Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson frequently explored the difficulty of combining the identity of "woman" with that of "artist." Their fiction either rejected marriage in favor of praising the single life or lamented the death of women's artistic selves after marriage. Phelps's The Story of Avis was the most popular of these works on marriage, and Boyd argues that it was "the most important novel of her generation about a woman artist" because it "laid bare the difficult choices women had to make between living for themselves or living for others" (91, 64).

In the third chapter, Boyd explores how Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson "found a way to reconcile their desires for serious recognition with their shame about possessing such high ambitions" by developing a belief that they must suffer for their art and that "they could achieve immortality only through great hardships" (128). They also fashioned heroines who suffered as they strove to create art. Boyd suggests that "however pessimistically they portrayed the outcomes of their female artists' careers, the authors' successes in these compositions and their identification with the grief of genius and ambition experienced by their artist heroines are testaments to their own ambitions and achievements" (183).

Because they sought recognition as artists, "they measured success not only in terms of sales but also in terms of critical praise" (184). In chapter four, Boyd examines how these artists sought entrance into the circle of the literary elite through their work, but also by networking and developing personal and professional associations with successful men, critics, editors, and writers who could aid their careers. Woolson's friendship with Henry James was the most famous of these relationships, but Boyd examines how each author networked to gain recognition for her work. Here, too, they faced conflict, as they were...