Writers of Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, and Josephine Herbst (review)

Scholarship on early twentieth-century popular women writers stands today in much the same position as scholarship on nineteenth-century American women writers some twenty years ago: writers who were once critically acclaimed and commercially successful are now virtually forgotten; their works are out of print, their names unknown to most scholars of American literature. Despite a growing number of dissertations, conference panels, and individual essays (most notably those collected in Lisa Bothshon and Meredith Goldsmith's Middlebrow Moderns), book-length studies of this era of women's writing remain rare. Moreover, scholars in this field are still plagued by the dismissive query that Jane Tompkins so memorably addressed with respect to nineteenth-century sentimental fiction: "But is it any good?" Julia Ehrhardt's Writers of Conviction answers with a resounding yes, even as she makes clear that the aesthetics and the politics of the writers she examines pose significantly different questions than the work of their nineteenth-century precursors.

While her subtitle echoes the feminist slogan "The personal is political," Ehrhardt's analysis persistently eschews the feminist desire to find in our subjects heroic role models whose lives and work embody our own contemporary concerns (9–10). Some of the issues raised—such as Herbst's advocacy of abortion rights—will resonate easily with today's feminists, and others—such as Gale's "municipal housekeeping" campaign—echo themes from nineteenth-century feminism. Still others are less familiar and more unsettling: Fisher's uneasy alliance with eugenicists in the Vermont tourism movement, for example, and Lane's relentless opposition to the New Deal. Yet Ehrhardt makes a compelling case not only for the political significance of these works but for a more complex understanding of the choices these writers made within very different historical contexts, as post-suffrage-era women gravitated toward diverse new causes and coalitions. Ultimately, Ehrhardt is far less concerned with judging these writers' politics than in explaining the personal and social circumstances that gave rise to them and exploring the textual strategies through which they articulated their politics so persuasively for their audiences.

Ehrhardt's decision to privilege the "personal" dimensions of these authors' careers over more "theoretical" generalizations about the commonalities they share allows for detailed and nuanced readings of each (185), something greatly needed in the case of writers whose careers have as yet received limited individual attention. At times, however, the same technique means that Ehrhardt risks glossing over historical conditions and themes that do recur—albeit implicitly—throughout many individual chapters. She does identify some intriguing biographical commonalities: most notably, she examines the demands imposed on these authors by the claims of emotionally and financially dependent parents and other kin, alternately spurring them to publication and limiting their freedom. Broader social conditions affecting women writers, such as the importance of the women's magazine market, are discussed primarily in individual cases. Most surprisingly downplayed (since it was central to Ehrhardt's previous dissertation work) is the loose association all four writers share with the tradition of regionalist women's writing, which—as Ehrhardt discusses briefly with respect to Fisher and Gale—enabled them to market their wares even as they sought to distance themselves from its conventions. While Ehrhardt's individual analyses make clear that simple labels—"regionalist," "magazine fiction," or "middlebrow"—do not do justice to the complexity and diversity of the work of these writers, the recurrence of certain broad historical issues warrants further attention.

Although Writers of Conviction does not offer broad critical paradigms for the study of early twentieth-century women writers, the conclusion offers a compelling argument for the value of studying writers who fit comfortably with neither the modernist paradigms of their own era nor the feminist paradigms of ours. The individual chapters, which combine extensive archival research with nuanced readings of published works, provide compelling evidence for that...