Private Woman, Public Stage
Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America
Mary Kelley
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 11/2017
Pages: 432
Subject: Literary Criticism, History, Social Science
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469617381
DESCRIPTION
In the decades spanning the nineteenth century, thousands of women
entered the literary marketplace. Twelve of the century's most
successful women writers provide the focus for Mary Kelley's
landmark study: Maria Cummins, Caroline Howard Gilman, Caroline Lee
Hentz, Mary Jane Holmes, Maria McIntosh, Sara Parton, Catharine
Maria Sedgwick, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary
Virginia Terhune, Susan Warner, and Augusta Evans Wilson. These
women shared more than commercial success. Collectively they
created fictions that Kelley terms "literary domesticity," books
that both embraced and called into question the complicated
expectations shaping the lives of so many nineteenth-century women.
Matured in a culture of domesticity and dismissed by a male writing
establishment, they struggled to reconcile public recognition with
the traditional roles of wife and mother.
Drawing on the 200 volumes of published prose and on the letters,
diaries, and journals of these writers, Kelley explores the
tensions that accompanied their unprecedented literary success. In
a new preface, she discusses the explosion in the scholarship on
writing women since the original 1984 publication of Private
Woman, Public Stage and reflects on the book's ongoing
relevance.