Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing by Sari Edelstein (review)

Sari Edelstein gives us a thought-provoking look at nineteenth-century women writers in the United States and their vexed relationship with print journalism. Edelstein argues that women’s writing was not nearly so private nor as domestic as often asserted. Denied the franchise and shut out from the arenas of commerce or politics, many women writers participated in public life through the pages of newspapers and novels, and many of the latter were disseminated in newspapers in serial form. Such fiction offered commentary on the limitations of print journalism and proposed, often through metatextual means, different ways of ascertaining fact and truth. Edelstein writes that women writers’ engagement with journalism reveals “a female literary tradition deeply attentive to the politics of truth discourses, suspicious of objectivity, and invested in spreading alternative kinds of news” (2).

Edelstein notes that newspapers, so strongly identified with the public sphere, also bridged the public and the domestic; she reminds us that even the reclusive Emily Dickinson read a newspaper every day. As a result, the newspaper functioned as “both inspiration and interlocutor” for women writers, provoking them to write while also providing a venue for their writing (10). At the same time, the newspaper press often proved a hostile environment for women writers, castigating them for emerging in a public forum and disciplining their transgressions in print. In response, women writers offered imaginative writing, especially fiction, as an alternative to journalism even as they adopted journalistic styles and techniques. Edelstein argues that these alternatives to the news offered truths that transcended factualism and rationalism and invited readers to grapple with the affective dimensions of human tragedy, suffering, and oppression.

Edelstein organizes her book chronologically and identifies five illustrative moments in the history of women writers and their negotiations with popular journalism. In the first chapter, she explores the relationship between “Seditious Newspapers and Seduction Novels.” Novels such as Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791/1794), and Judith Sargent Murray’s The Story of Margaretta (1798) were criticized in the popular press for corrupting their intellectually feeble (i.e., female) readers. However, Edelstein shows that they also critiqued print journalism for engaging in partisan politics and promoting factionalism—and thus undermining the stability of the new nation. In doing so, Edelstein complicates Michael Warner’s widely accepted representation of the novel as a threat to the rational discourse of the public sphere; she suggests instead that the discourse of the public sphere, as it appeared in newspapers, was often quite as sensational, and often more incendiary, than seduction novels themselves.

The penny press transformed American newspaper journalism in the 1830s. In Chapter 2, “Rereading the Fallen Woman and the Penny Press,” Edelstein traces the contentious relationship between the penny press and the early republican press, on the one hand, and sentimental fiction, on the other. Claiming to be guided by a hard-nosed objectivity, the penny press feminized the passionate partisanship of the early newspapers and also scoffed at the “sickly” sentiment offered by contemporary women writers. They exercised a vigorous, masculine factualism on the bodies of “fallen women”—poor women, often prostitutes—whose sensational murders were graphically depicted in the pages of the penny press under the guise of objective, scientific inquiry. In response, sentimental works by Catharine Williams (Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, 1833) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick critiqued the penny press’s salacious accounts of fallen women. These texts recast the plight of the “modern” woman in terms of the ethical dilemmas they faced and the social responsibility they bore, rather than the bare, sometimes grisly, facts of their disfigured bodies.

Chapter 3, “Category Crisis in Antebellum Story Papers,” argues that the attempts of story-papers such as Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger to present themselves as non-partisan, unifying, stabilizing influences were belied by their hybrid form, which presented...