Project MUSE®: Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 17, no. 2 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: Legacy: A Journal of American Women WritersTWOProject MUSE®Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers1534-06430748-4321Latest articles in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Leaving Giants Unslain: Idle Activism in Catharine Sedgwick's The Linwoods and Other Writings
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968049
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Writing a letter in March 1857, Catharine Maria Sedgwick asked the Reverend Dr. Orville Dewey, "Is it not rather a folly (is it worse?) at my time of life to perpetrate a novel without any purpose or hope to slay giants, slavery, or the like, but only to supply mediocre readers with small moral hints on various subjects that come up in daily life?" (Dewey 369). At the impressive age of sixty-eight, Sedgwick's "time of life" left her the only remaining living member of her immediate family, the successful author of five major novels and countless short works, and the first director of the New York Women's Prison Association. Despite these milestones, a persistent concern lingered over whether her efforts had been
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallLeaving Giants Unslain: Idle Activism in Catharine Sedgwick's The Linwoods and Other Writings2025-08-22text/htmlen-USLeaving Giants Unslain: Idle Activism in Catharine Sedgwick's The Linwoods and Other Writings2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®1149602026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Indigenous Motherhood and Child Separation in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968050
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"In my Century of Dishonor I tried to attack people's consciences directly, and they would not listen," she explained to a friend after completing the novel. "Now I have sugared my pill, and it remains to be seen how it will go down."The padre "taught us to sing (our own songs were ugly), he taught us to speak (our own languages were nonsensical), he made us wear clothes (our bodies were shameful), he gave us wheat and the plow (our seeds and acorns were fit only for animals)."The 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Haaland v. Brackeen, affirming the constitutionality of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, brought renewed attention to the separation of Indigenous children from their families and tribes. As Justice Amy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallIndigenous Motherhood and Child Separation in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona2025-08-22text/htmlen-USIndigenous Motherhood and Child Separation in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®945852026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Legal and Domestic Geographies in Susan Glaspell's Trifles
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968051
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Based loosely on the events surrounding the investigation into the murder of Iowa farmer John Hossack in 1900, Susan Glaspell's 1916 one-act play Trifles has been described as a meditation on the non-correspondence between justice and the law (Bendel-Simso 292). The action takes place shortly after the murder by strangulation of the fictionalized Hossack, John Wright. His wife, Minnie Foster Wright, has been arrested for the crime and is being detained in the local jail. A county attorney and the sheriff, along with the neighbor who first encountered Minnie Wright on the morning after the murder, enter the home to investigate. Accompanying them are Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, the wives of the neighbor and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallLegal and Domestic Geographies in Susan Glaspell's Trifles2025-08-22text/htmlen-USLegal and Domestic Geographies in Susan Glaspell's Trifles2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®830022026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Legacy Profile: Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968052
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"Who Is This Baltimore Authoress?" inquired that city's Sun newspaper in November 1889. The novel Metzerott, Shoemaker had appeared a few months before, and despite its unwieldy title, middling publisher, and anonymous authorship, it received positive early notice in newspapers including the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle (Figure 1). The novel's title character, Karl Metzerott, is only one of a wide-ranging cast of characters living amid the capitalistic consolidation and labor unrest of the late nineteenth century. Its deeply felt depiction of labor struggle, engagement with socialistic political thought and Christian theology, and trenchant critique of capitalism—combined with its romantic subplots
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallLegacy Profile: Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USLegacy Profile: Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®926472026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Legacy Profile: The Midlife Poetry of Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1885–1970)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968053
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But I feel, if they will let me alone, (these people who insist on Symphony Ball tickets being sold and surprise birthday parties organized, both … [of] which have gobbled up hours and hours, and visiting friends who must be asked to tea, friends of friends, I mean, who come to tea and talk of diets and exercize, until I who begin by listening raptly, end by wanting to scream) I will write something I'd admire to send you!—Marjorie Allen Seiffert to Robert Liddell Lowe, 2 February 1932At first glance, Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1885–1970) seems an unlikely modernist. A middle-aged woman living in Moline, Illinois—where, according to her grandson, no one "gave two hoots in hell for poetry" (qtd. in Russek 85)—Seiffert
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallLegacy Profile: The Midlife Poetry of Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1885–1970)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USLegacy Profile: The Midlife Poetry of Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1885–1970)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®1325692026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22What Jane Knew: Anishinaabe Stories and American Imperialism, 1815–1845 by Maureen Konkle (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968054
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What Jane Knew gets right to the stories. It opens onto a monster known as a Windigo devouring a deer carcass, "which he glutted up, sucking the bones, and drinking the blood" (xi). The excerpt comes from a story translated and written down by William Johnston, younger brother of the Ojibwe writer Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. It was one of dozens of stories that Jane's husband, Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, collected and published under his own name in Algic Researches (1839). After moving into the Johnston family's home at Sault Ste. Marie in 1822, Schoolcraft consumed Anishinaabe knowledge wherever he could find it, extracting knowledge about their customs, their language (Ojibwemowin), and their stories
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallWhat Jane Knew: Anishinaabe Stories and American Imperialism, 1815–1845 by Maureen Konkle (review)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USWhat Jane Knew: Anishinaabe Stories and American Imperialism, 1815–1845 by Maureen Konkle (review)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®107382026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature by Mary Grace Albanese (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968055
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Contemporary literature and literary and cultural criticism have increasingly professed the inherent validity, as well as the political and social impact, of Black diasporic practices such as "rootwork, spiritual practices, birthwork, and carework" (7). However, beyond select humanities disciplines, too many still frequently consider such practices only in certain limited (often gendered as feminine) valences, misunderstanding or failing to see their capacity to shape politics or society. Few scholars manifest the ability to validate Black diasporic women and genderqueer people's relation to major world structures without requiring their absorption into them. Mary Grace Albanese's Black Women and Energies of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallBlack Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature by Mary Grace Albanese (review)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USBlack Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature by Mary Grace Albanese (review)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®108652026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America by Michele Currie Navakas (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968056
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As the opening of Michele Currie Navakas's Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America states, when coral comes to mind in the present day it's usually in relation to reports of warming oceans and the extermination of formerly vibrant reefs. Coral, once part of the daily material reality of nineteenth-century Americans, has grown largely absent from the public eye. Yet the anxieties of the Anthropocene have demanded a renewed attention to our rapidly changing environment, and this literal sea shift has invited coral's reemergence as the subject of scholarly interest. Recent books such as Juliana Chow's Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History and Whitney Barlow
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallCoral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America by Michele Currie Navakas (review)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USCoral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America by Michele Currie Navakas (review)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®121992026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America by Rachel E. Walker (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968057
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"Margaret Fuller was an ugly woman. At least that was what Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed," writes Rachel E. Walker halfway through Beauty and the Brain (95). But "physiognomy and phrenology provided people with something that nonscientific discussions of Fuller's beauty never could: evidence that she was intellectually exceptional" (96). Walker argues not only that these sciences—theories that a person's face (physiognomy) and head (phrenology) reflect their inner being—underpin a debate over Fuller's supposed ugliness, but that physiognomy and phrenology reveal tensions at the center of American culture. In particular, phrenology and physiognomy offered a theory of human malleability to the young American
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallBeauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America by Rachel E. Walker (review)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USBeauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America by Rachel E. Walker (review)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®102372026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands by Bernadine Marie Hernández (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968058
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In Border Bodies, Bernardine Marie Hernández asks what the United States has classified as labor and capital accumulation and whom it has recognized as laborers. To answer these questions, she reads against established US literary history to foreground the archives of the Latina/o nineteenth century and bring into view brown women in the US-Mexico borderlands between 1834 and 1912. According to Hernández, racialized Mexicanas, Nuevamexicanas, Californianas, and Tejanas, and their bodies "are lynchpins in the capitalist transformation of the West and Southwest," whose labor financed the region's economic development (3).Applying a Marxist lens, Border Bodies traces how colonial and imperial histories of sexual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallBorder Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands by Bernadine Marie Hernández (review)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USBorder Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands by Bernadine Marie Hernández (review)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®93412026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22The Afterlife of Sympathy: Reading American Literary Realism in the Wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Faye Halpern (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968059
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How should a person read? What is the best way to teach a person how to read? What kind of books should a person read? In answer to all these questions, we have come to expect a singular response: one should be a critical reader and should read books that encourage critical reading. But what if being a critical reader is not all that it's cracked up to be? What if critical reading made one not want to read books at all, especially the kind of books—sentimental novels—that shun readers who read critically? These are the pressing questions that preoccupy Faye Halpern in her engaging and enormously useful book The Afterlife of Sympathy: Reading American Literary Realism in the Wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin. While Halpern
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallThe Afterlife of Sympathy: Reading American Literary Realism in the Wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Faye Halpern (review)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USThe Afterlife of Sympathy: Reading American Literary Realism in the Wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Faye Halpern (review)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®89022026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22Feminism against Cisness ed. by Emma Heaney (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968060
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According to Feminism against Cisness, scholars and activists need to understand cisness (the state of having, and always having had, an identity fully aligned with one's body) not as simply naming an observable and default state of gender, but rather as describing how beliefs about gender's stability and self-integrity across time are produced by structures of power. Editor Emma Heaney argues in her introduction, "Sexual Difference without Cisness," that cisness describes the myth of a materially impossible bodily and gendered integrity, and that those whose existence highlights bodily vulnerability, such as "[p]eople who are racialized or poor, people with disabilities," and trans people, suffer under the regime
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/115/image/coversmallFeminism against Cisness ed. by Emma Heaney (review)2025-08-22text/htmlen-USFeminism against Cisness ed. by Emma Heaney (review)2025-08-222025TWOProject MUSE®95922026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-08-22