Letters on Writing

The title of this new volume of women's correspondence derives from Harriet Beecher Stowe's words to George Eliot: "A book is a hand stretched forth in the dark passage of life to see if there is another hand to meet it …" (25 May 1859). The two women never met, and this letter, though only Stowe's second to Eliot, is characteristic of the passion and intimacy expressed in many of the letters in this excellent volume edited by Jennifer Cognard-Black and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls. The thirteen writers span a period during which readers' tastes and the publishing industry that catered to—or created—those tastes went through a significant transition.

The volume begins with Stowe's letters to Eliot and goes on to include the mostly unpublished letters of writers both more and less familiar to readers: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mary Abigail Doge [Gail Hamilton], Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mary Cholmondeley, Rhoda Broughton, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison (Lucas Malet), Henrietta Stannard, Maria Corelli, Annesley Kenealy, Rosamund Marriot Watson (Graham R. Tomson), Palma Pederson and Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (George Egerton) and Jessie Redmond Fauset. All told, then, the volume gives us an impressive sampling, from post Civil War through the Harlem Renaissance; from New Women to relatively obscure Norwegian immigrant writer Palma Pederson, who calls our attention to one of America's unique ethnic immigrant literary subcultures.

The editors argue that each writer's letters reveal the women's attempt to "articulate and identify their authorial selves, create camaraderie with others and negotiate the literary world." In other words, nineteenth-century women writers wrote letters about the sorts of things we imagine deeply committed professional writers tend to care about: their work-in-progress and the personal and professional obstacles to completing it; money troubles; relationships with publishers; frustrations over sales and contracts; and their own admiration or criticism of other people's literary work. If this laundry list sounds predictable, rest assured that the letters in this volume are anything but mundane. The intellect, wit, frustration, and energy of these women fairly crackle to offer us insight and pleasure.

But of course, as much as current readers might feel a kinship with these predecessors, the letters are not timeless. They speak to and of the unique way the culture dished up sexism, racism, and an array of cultural biases and changing tastes that the women had to negotiate. Arranged chronologically, the letters' overall effect is striking, both for the changing society they map and the intractable problems that seem virtually unchanged by the passage of time. By the 1930s, the women's voices read, overall, as more professional and confident than those of the previous century, and yet the constant need to push back against sexism continues unabated, and it seems sometimes as if the work of the woman writer was and always will be primarily concerned with defending her own right to exist.

The book's introduction provides nonspecialists and especially teachers useful background material. Two sections, "Recovering British and American Women Authors" and "Accessing Unpublished Correspondence by Women Authors," indicate the special challenges besetting outsider authors, in particular women of color and immigrant women. "The Epistle as Literature, the Epistle as History" and "Transatlanticisms," two other sections of the introduction both acknowledge and challenge the traditional paradigms of literature and criticism into which this volume is launched. The former highlights the rich tradition of epistolary writing and its study, from the letters of Paul to Richardson's Pamela to American historians' mining of the correspondence of the founding fathers. The latter section describes the transatlantic literary marketplace and its highly mobile authors, and hastens, this critic hopes, the demise of the overused separation of American and British Literature that for so long has dominated both criticism and the classroom. The section "1865 to 1935: The American and British Milieu" gives a sweeping but...