American women writers series

Two novels of 1920s Harlem describe Helga Crane's search for freedom and personal expression, and Irene's friendship with Clare, who attempts to pass for white.

First published in 1824, Hobomok is the story of an upper-class white woman who marries an Indian chief, has a child, then leaves him--with the child--for another man.

When Ruth Hall was originally published in 1855, it caused a sensation. In it, Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton) portrays a mid-nineteenth-century woman who realizes the American Dream solely on her own becoming the incarnation of the American individualist-regarded at that time as a role designed exclusively for men. Based on the author's life, the novel reflects her spirit of practical feminism-that a woman was only truly independent when she was financially independent.

"In The Land of Little Rain, Austin's attention to natural detail allows her to write prose that is geographically, biologically, and botanically accurate at the same time that it offers metaphorical insight into human emotional and spiritual experience. In Lost Borders, Austin focuses on both white and Indian women's experiences in the desert, looks for the sources of their deprivation, and finds them in the ways life betrays them, usually in the guise of men. She offers several portraits of strong women characters but ultimately identifies herself with the desert, which she personifies as a woman."

Caroline Matilda (Stansbury) Kirkland (1801-1864) was a middle-class white woman with a literary bent who moved with her husband and children to the woods of Michigan in the mid-1830s to settle a newly-planned village. In this book, first published in 1839, she offers what she claims to be "an honest portraiture of rural life in a new country" (p. 5). Through a series of vignettes and anecdotes strung loosely into a narrative, Kirkland brings to life the social and material culture of a community on what was perceived as the frontier, presenting her experiences with a sense of ironic amusement. She reveals much about social life, social roles and behavior, especially among women. She describes the business of settlement, including how land was purchased and towns planned, and the haste, confusion, speculation and fraud attendant on such transactions. She comments on the social shifts pioneer life made possible, especially the egalitarianism which poorer migrants claimed as their right in new settlements, and the tensions that resulted as migrants from wealthier classes struggled to maintain and adapt the ways of status and culture they had formerly known. Her narrative also dwells on the details of domestic life, showing how houses were constructed and furnished, depicting the difficulties of housekeeping in crudely-built settlements, and the physical challenges of disease, accidents, bad roads, and the exhausting labor of deforestation and new farming. For all its light-hearted tone, Kirkland's book suggests much about how human communities bound together by neighborhood and necessity began to coalesce in a challenging and drastically changing land.

The leading feminist intellectual of her day, Margaret Fuller has been remembered for her groundbreaking work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which recharted the gender roles of nineteenth-century men and women. In this new collection, the full range of her literary career is represented--from her earliest poetry to her final dispatch from revolutionary Italy. For the first time, the complete texts of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Summer on the Lakes are printed. Together along with generous selections from Fuller's Dial essays, New York essays, Italian dispatches, and unpublished journals. Special features are the complete text of Fuller's famous "Autobiographical Romance" (never before reprinted in its entirety) and nineteen of her poems, edited from her manuscripts. All of Fuller's major texts are completely annotated, with special attention to her literary and historical sources, as well as her knowledge of American Indian. Culture, mythology, and the Bible. Jeffrey Steele's introduction provides an important revision of Fuller's biography and literary career tracing the growth of her feminism and her development into one of America's preeminent social critics. No other writer of Fuller's day could match the range of her experience. Growing up in the world of Boston intellectuals, she was a close personal friend of the Alcotts, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. But she also traveled. Adventurously to the western frontier, canoed down rapids with Chippewa Indians, visited the outcast and the poor in New York's institutions and prisons, and experienced the rigors of war during the bombardment of Rome. As a whole, this anthology provides the material to understand one of the most fascinating nineteenth-century American women writers.