Daughters of the Tenth Muse: New Histories of Women and Writing in Early America

In the opening chapter of Writing Women's Literary History, Margaret J. M. Ezell argues that by the early 1990s, substantial work had been done on early British women writers but that this scholarship had not yet transformed the larger narrative of British women's literary history. Earlier studies of these writers had focused on the necessary work of recovering the writings and biographies of individual writers, leaving intact a literary historiography that positioned the nineteenth-century novelist as the standard against which earlier women writers should be judged. The result was that, despite recovery of many neglected texts and authors, most early British women writers continued to be viewed as anomalies, since they did not fit an evolutionary line that led to the nineteenth-century model. Ezell's work on pre-1700 writers and literary historiography helped to spur a broader reconceptualization of British women's literary history.

We are in the midst of a similar transformation in our understanding of the place of eighteenth-century women writers in American literary history. Scholars have recovered a critical mass of primary texts and literary biographies, and we have embarked on a new paradigm of literary history—one that accepts the validity of manuscript circulation as a form of publication and that values a multiplicity of genres. With the revaluation of sentimental fiction initiated by Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word (1986) and renewed attention to manuscript culture spurred by David Shields's Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (1997), Carla Mulford's edition of the poetry of Annis Boudinot Stockton (1995), and Karin Wulf and Catherine La Courreye Blecki's edition of the commonplace book of Milcah Martha Moore (1997), the foundation has been laid for a consideration of early American women's writing in all its variety, including both print and manuscript culture and ranging widely across genres. With these innovative works as models—and as inspiration, pointing out the many ways in which analyses of women's writing could be extended—momentum seems to be gathering. Important writers including Judith Sargent Murray, Martha Laurens Ramsay, and, most recently, Hannah Adams and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson have finally been considered in book-length literary biographies. Along with Harris's Executing Race, to be considered here, Susan Stabile's Memory's Daughters (2004) offers a detailed synthetic analysis, treating a group of writers rather than a single writer (always potentially viewed as anomalous). More such comparative and synthetic analyses certainly await, given our new awareness of the breadth of women's writing. Even in terms of editions and biographies, much remains to be done; many fascinating figures remain on the shadowy periphery of our literary history simply because their most important texts remain in the archive. If the last decade is an indication of things to come, however, we are poised to do this work in a way that will continue to reshape the larger narrative of early American literary history.

If this sketch of recent scholarly developments in early women's writing sounds like an Enlightenment-inspired teleology, I follow Ezell in conceding that this new historiography, like any other historical narrative, is partial, selective, and bound to be rewritten in the future. Nevertheless, we must continue to construct it. A literary history that takes into account the cultural work performed by the fullest possible range of writings by early American women is intrinsically interesting, but, more important, such a narrative can speak to us in meaningful ways about U.S. cultural origins, as well as help us to understand contemporary issues...