American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869, and: Women, Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts (review)

It is indeed sobering that so little scholarship addresses nineteenth-century American women writers' relationship to law. Two recent scholarly works seek to remedy this oversight: Melissa Homestead's American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 and Joyce Warren's Women, Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts. Given the uncharted critical terrain of law's relationship to nineteenth-century American women writers, both authors recognize that theorizing correspondences between law and literary history must go hand-in-hand with recovering the specific circumstances of women's encounters with law. Taken together, these works demonstrate the power of law over attitudes toward and literary representations of femininity in nineteenth-century America. Yet despite covering coinciding historical terrain—Homestead examines intersections of coverture and copyright law between 1820 and 1870, whereas Warren surveys law's relationship to women's economic participation throughout the nineteenth century—they differ broadly in their critical expectations of correspondences between literary text and historical context. This difference highlights the potential breakthroughs and obstacles future criticism may encounter when examining this field.

In American Women Authors and Literary Property, Melissa Homestead (building upon Meredith McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting) frames female authorship as one facet of the greater economic structure of the mid-century literary marketplace, legal dimensions of which privileged readers' claims to the usefulness of print materials over authors' proprietary claims to their works. Homestead's examinations of the experiences of Mary Virginia Terhune, Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, and Augusta Jane Evans trace the effects of a "productive fiction in women's engagements with the market" (18). Ultimately, she explains, "copyright law and . . . laws affecting the status of women" became sources of creativity and prosperity for women authors (18). Though she emphasizes how women authors imagined "the struggle and dispossession . . . not secure possession" of their works in print, the experiences of her female authors come to represent the kinds of struggles authors throughout the period faced, as law affected how authors conceived of their relationship to literary works (as products of imagination and as commodities), publishers (as distributors of their works), and readers (as the ultimate arbiters of their works' value) (61).

Homestead elegantly handles women writers' negotiation of the laws of the culture of reprinting and arrives at compelling insights regarding the authors she examines and the period she reconstructs. In "'Suited to the Market': Catharine Sedgwick, Female Authorship, and the Literary Property Debates, 1822–1842," Homestead demonstrates that Sedgwick should be understood as a "model" author, as facets of Sedgwick's "disinterested authorial persona"— her anonymity, her reticence toward the literary marketplace, her stress on the value of reading, and her shift to didactic fiction—were a strategic response to the republican drives of the literary marketplace (69). In "'When I Can Read My Title Clear': Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Stowe v. Thomas Copyright Infringement Case (1853)," Homestead persuasively argues that Stowe's suit for control over a German-language serial reprint of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) dramatized one of the central debates over copyright, between authors' desire to prosper from their writing and readers' desire for access to reading materials. All the while, Homestead painstakingly reconstructs the lively, sometimes desperate, historical circumstances in which authors encountered the limits of the law.

Joyce Warren does not seem to share Homestead's sense that law productively informed nineteenth-century women writers' experiences. Rather, in Women, Money, and the Law, Warren represents nineteenth-century law as hostile to women, part of a dominant discourse in American society coercing female economic dependence. Warren explains that she wishes to articulate a counternarrative in her study by recovering its public (published) and nonpublic (litigious) female voices. Chapters...