Making the "America of Art": Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, and: Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900 (review)

Making the "America of Art" and Reclaiming Authorship overlap in their focus on nineteenth-century American women's writing as a serious art and a serious business. Both books build upon traditions of female authorship presented in earlier groundbreaking analyses, most notably by Susan Coultrap-McQuin and Susan K. Harris, in their respective studies, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century and 19th-Century American Womens's Novels: Intepretive Strategies. Sofer's and Williams's studies participate in an ongoing discussion about women writers' (at times) contradictory notions of aesthetics and civic responsibilities, of familial and public voices, and of domestic duties and business contractual obligations. In their focus on nineteenth-century women's self-assessment as serious writers, they resemble two other recent studies, Anne E. Boyd's Writing for Immortality: Women Writers and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America and Deborah Barker's Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist.

There is some overlap in the authors upon which the two texts focus: Sofer examines the writings and careers of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Augusta Evans, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, while Williams looks at Alcott and Phelps, as well as Maria Susanna Cummins, Mary Abigail Dodge, and Elizabeth Keckley. Both Sofer and Williams argue that nineteenth-century American women writers moved from domestic or sentimental writing to a higher form of art associated with realism, and thus achieved a more professional self-image and a new-found respect from male peers. Sofer claims that antebellum women writers were primarily concerned with making money or with making moral pronouncements in their work. However, during the transitional period of the 1860s, women became part of a literary movement to create a national aesthetic that would promote the idea of a nation of art over a nation of toil. While male writers discussed this new aesthetic in literary essays in privileged forums like the Atlantic Monthly, Sofer argues, female writers addressed the new cultural nationalism and the role of the artist in their novels.

Williams, on the other hand, believes that antebellum women frequently gave vent to their creativity by engaging in informal literary activities, like letter-writing, writing for gift annuals, and reading/writing in the domestic setting of the parlor, and this informal habit of sharing one's work led the way to the professional female author in post-bellum America. Maria Cummins, for example, initially wrote The Lamplighter as a form of entertainment, to read aloud to her nieces (13). Ultimately, Williams argues, antebellum parlor literature gave way to a postbellum female authorship that "insisted on legal and financial rights as well as on authorial responsibility" (123). This claim to authorship has been obscured by scholars' recent rejection of the term "author" as too privileged and their use of "writer" in its place; it is time, Williams argues, "to move beyond such oppositional thinking and to focus instead on the thoughtful commentaries that specific women offered about the trajectories, practices, and even pleasures of authorship" (10, 16).

Both Sofer and Williams point to mentors in aiding aspiring women writers. While Williams focuses on correspondence between women authors to show how they helped one another, Sofer shows that they knew of each other's work (as evidenced in letters and memoirs) and published in the same "quality journals" (7). Sofer and Williams both discuss James T. Fields as a proponent of high art in his journal, the Atlantic Monthly, as well as in his role as publisher at Ticknor and Fields, and both document his failure as a mentor to emerging women authors like Davis and Dodge. Both also point to...