In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor's Note
  • Nicole Tonkovich

With this issue of Legacy, long-time readers will note several changes in our treatment of the secondary scholarship on women. Part of the original intent of the journal was to demonstrate the extent and viability of scholarship in an emergent field eager to establish its bona fides in the academy. Twenty-five years later, the good news is that that argument has been soundly made. The current wealth of scholarship on American women writers has led us to revise our overall policy about how to apprise our readers of the state of the secondary scholarship in the field. We have reached the difficult decision that we can no longer hope to review every book that is related to our subject. We will continue, however, to publish a comprehensive Bookshelf listing twice yearly, in which we will account, insofar as it is possible, for everything published in our field.

The Legacy Bookshelf will no longer appear in print, but will be posted twice yearly on our website, at the same time the paper journal is mailed to subscribers. We will send you a reminder via the SSAWW listserv to consult it there. If you are not yet a member of that listserv, you may subscribe at <http://mailman.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/ssaww-L>.

In the pages thus freed up, we will continue to publish reviews of important books in the field, especially as they relate to the journal's continuing commitment to recovering the work of women writers, but will expand the length of each review by about twenty-five percent, hoping to offer readers a more complex evaluation of each book's content. Additionally, we will explore new ways of engaging with the most significant new scholarship in longer, more substantive and comparative ways. In this issue, for example, we print a lengthy review essay by Jeffrey Steele, himself a respected Margaret Fuller scholar, of three recent studies of that foundational writer and thinker. In future issues, we plan to engage several scholars in a conversation about a single new work, for example, or to invite reflections on how new works engage with and revise existing foundational texts in our discipline.

As always, we invite you to help us in this endeavor. If you are interested in writing book reviews for the journal, please contact Etta Madden, our Book Review Editor (if you have not done so within the last two years), at the address listed inside the front cover. [End Page 1]

We would like to use this opportunity to thank the officers and planners of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers for organizing another superb conference. We especially appreciate the generous social and intellectual celebrations of the journal's twenty-fifth anniversary that were a part of that gathering.

If you were not able to attend this conference, you may have missed the exciting announcement that a full and fully searchable index of all the issues of Legacy is now available on our website. This comprehensive listing also contains abstracts of each of the major articles we have published. We owe our editorial assistant Lisa M. Thomas a huge thanks for her work in preparing the index and writing those abstracts. Thanks, too, to Gary B. Hoffman for programming the index.

Finally, as a new decade begins, we note a number of staffing changes. We thank Carolyn Sorisio for her long and valuable service as a Board member. Carolyn has graciously agreed to continue to work with the journal as a reader/consultant. We are pleased to announce the appointment of Gregory Eiselein of Kansas State University as a Board Member for the 2010-2013 term.

Several new colleagues will join our cadre of reader/consultants: Faye Halpern, University of Calgary; Tamara Harvey, George Mason University; Elizabeth Hewitt, Ohio State University; Karen Weyler, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and Susan S. Williams, Ohio State University. We thank them all for their willingness to devote their time to this important work. [End Page 2]

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