Windows on Writing: Susanna Rowson and the Scene of Female Authorship

Although Susanna Rowson has achieved prominence within the history of the early American novel, little attention has been paid to her fictional representation of women writers. In this essay, I seek to rectify this oversight by exploring female author-characters within four of her novels. I argue that Rowson employs window scenes to materialize the experience of women writers, and particularly to convey the obstacles that prevented women's writing from receiving fair evaluation by the reading public. Similarly, the prefaces of Rowson's novels (their figurative thresholds) serve as stages upon which women writers debate male figures who represent the gendered biases of eighteenth-century print culture. I conclude by analyzing Rowson's novel Trials of the Human Heart, which portrays an author-character's failure to publish. By attending to the novelistic devices that Rowson uses, I uncover her ambivalent stance on the viability of authorship as a career for women.