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Woman's Fiction: Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-70
Book by Baym, Nina
- GenresLiterary Criticism
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
Nina Baym
39 books17 followersNina Baym (born 1936) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She is best known as the General Editor of the renowned The Norton Anthology of American Literature, from 1991 - 2018. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for over 40 years, from 1963 to 2004.
Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance.
While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated.
It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales.
“I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987.
She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity.
Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004).
Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text."
The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time.
Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She died in 1971.
Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance.
While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated.
It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales.
“I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987.
She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity.
Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004).
Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text."
The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time.
Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She died in 1971.
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February 15, 2022
Lately I have been developing an interest in Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a novelist of the early American period and daughter of Theodore Sedgwick.* Woman’s Fiction by Nina Baym popped up as a resource with a chapter on Sedgwick, but it turned out to be so much more! She here details the “damned mob of scribbling women” whose literary offerings Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed cut into his book sales. In Baym’s day, critics claimed the popularity of books by these writers drove “better” books like Moby-dick into obscurity. As if the same readers who enjoyed woman’s fiction enjoyed belabored tales of the whaling industry.
Anyway.
Baym argues that these writers of “woman’s fiction” (derogatorily called “sentimental fiction” and “domestic fiction” in scholarship) were immensely popular in their day, and made up a good chunk of the literary culture of the New Republic. Too much, if you’re a male writer, evidently. The questions of life in early America, the introduction of the psychological novel, and a quest for morality not found in the popular seduction novels of the day (*squints at Samuel Richardson*) contributed to the development of a new genre, which prized good, strong heroines (who experienced no character growth), good, strong men (who loved our heroines for their goodness and strength), foils (who died or lost their fortunes in disgrace), and ridiculously contrived plots.
One of the reasons woman’s fiction did not survive was because most of the novels were not well-written. As mentioned above, the heroines had already matured into perfect women and only needed to prove their crystalline morals during Trials™. Plots followed a few basic rhythms with little deviation. Romance was flat, and the endings usually found the lady a mother in her own home without much of an interior life. In some cases, Baym points out, the writing itself is poor. Caroline Chesebro’ is one instance of this; her novels sound very intriguing until you learn she was given to lengthy sermons in her novel, lest her readers miss the point. There are plenty of contradictions to this, but overall, the literary qualities that keep readers coming back over the centuries do not populate these novels. Something I look for as a reader is motivation, for both “good” and “bad” characters. Without it, I don’t know the character as a person. Surface-level motivations suffice not, which is why Joseph Andrews and I don’t get along. As novels intended to communicate good American morals in the period of the seduction novel and proliferating erotica, woman’s fiction did its job. “Novels” gained a bad reputation from the Clelland types, but authors like Sedgwick sought to redeem the form, which paved the way for future female writers’ contributions.
Baym gives us many examples of women who lived off their earnings by writing. A common misconception about women like Harriet Beecher Stowe** and Louisa May Alcott is that they were unusual in their day for making a living by their pens, that they were daring and groundbreaking and scandalous. Baym’s work effectively shows that they were not. In fact, reading through the plots and characters of novels in Woman’s Fiction helped me understand Alcott’s work even better, particularly A Garland for Girls, An Old-Fashioned Girl, and Rose in Bloom. Baym only briefly discusses the first volume of Little Women at the end of the book, but much more could be made of Alcott’s take on woman’s fiction and its move into children’s fiction. Alcott subverts the genre--her flighty antiheroines reform rather than dying in shame like those in woman’s fiction are wont to do--but the reader can trace the impact of woman’s fiction on Alcott’s work. She likely grew up reading it, and her mother Abba probably knew some of the authors. Besides Sedgwick and Augusta Evans, E.D.E.N. Southworth was the only author I had heard of in this genre, because of a note about “Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury” in Little Women. Southworth, however, came by all of her initials honestly, making me wonder what Alcott imagined for Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury.
Baym quotes two woman’s fiction authors who describe their self-concept as writers. Marion Harland wrote in her autobiography, “Mine is a story for the table and arm-chair under the reading lamp in the living-room, and not for the library shelves.” (32) Fanny Fern’s dedication for Rose Clark was to a particular situation:
When the frost curtains the windows, when the wind whistles fiercely at the key-hole, when the bright fire glows, and the tea-tray is removed, and father in his slippered feet lolls in his arm-chair; and mother with her nimble needle ‘makes auld claes look amaist as weel as new,’ and grandmamma draws closer to the chimney-corner, and Tommy with his plate of chestnuts nestles contentedly at her feet; then let my unpretending story be read. For such an hour, for such an audience, was it written. (32)
Who is missing from this image? The daughter, and dare I say, the one reading the book aloud to the family. Fern, at least, intended her work for an audience beyond females, but she intended it for family consumption in the home. It is no wonder Hawthorne was so perturbed by the prevalence of woman’s fiction in his time. These stories were reaching many more readers than his, gaining more cultural purchase than he had.
Reading Woman’s Fiction over 40 years after its publication, I like to think Baym’s plea has been heard. A college professor of mine recommended Sedgwick to me years ago, and my Penguin edition of A New England Tale was first published in 2003. As a scholar myself, the advice I give anyone looking for a good “in” is to find someone to write about who has a plethora of extant documentation, but who is underutilized in scholarship. That way, it’s very easy to offer something new to the field and have a unique angle of study, because few others are talking about that person, yet you have a lot of material to analyze. (I got this hot tip from a fellow student in my MA program, who wrote an award-winning thesis on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, a novelist mentioned in Woman's Fiction, but who did not fit into the genre.) Many, many women from the past fit this bill, and I’d definitely recommend the authors in Woman’s Fiction to budding literary scholars who don’t want to be the millionth scholar of Austen, Twain, Shakespeare, or what have you. It’s much harder to say something new about them than it is to say something new about an unremembered figure.
I’m not leaving Woman’s Fiction with a lengthy to-read list, but I will be looking into a few of the authors, and continuing to think about how this genre shaped fiction by women in the rest of the 19th century. The female authors examined here pioneered the respectable, middle-class, self-supporting author. Southworth was a single mother, Sedgwick a single woman. More often than not, however, these authors were married, and maintained their home lives alongside their writing lives. They were widely published, not always under pseudonyms, and earned well for their work. Their efforts laid the groundwork for upper-class American women to write, like Edith Wharton, and for middle-class writers like Alcott to live comfortably and respectably by their pens. Woman’s Fiction is not only important for literary studies, but also for understanding the lives of professional female writers and readers. Understanding what American women were reading in the 19th century helps us understand the generation that was known for widespread social activism and conflicted over suffrage. Baym’s argument pleasingly subverts the misconception that 19th-century women were repressed and unintellectual. Alcott was not an aberration from the norm. These women did their thinking in fiction, and tended a garden of American women’s writing that has continued to flourish for centuries.
*Theodore Sedgwick and Tapping Reeve were the legal representation for Elizabeth “Mumbet/Bett” Freeman and Brom, who successfully sued their enslaver for their freedom in 1781. Bett and Brom vs. Ashley was a groundbreaking case because it used the “free and equal” statement in the Massachusetts state constitution, and was later upheld in freedom cases. Freeman spent the rest of her life working for wages in the Sedgwick household, and is buried in the Sedgwick family plot.
**Baym posits that Stowe was not an author of woman’s fiction, because her work does not fit the conventions of the genre, and her work was not geared to a female audience. Some authors who wrote woman’s fiction also wrote outside the genre, such as Sedgwick.
-----
“Most of the American authors were middle-class women who needed money. As a general rule--although exceptions increased as the period wore on--only middle-class women had sufficient education to know how to write books, and only those who needed money attempted it. However, the unstable financial condition of American life ensured that there was a sizable group of such women and made their thematic concern with the problems of self-support pertinent to many readers.” (30)
“Like Benjamin Franklin before them, and Malcolm X after them, they saw literacy as the foundation of liberation. Since this message was embodied in fiction, it supposed an audience already literate; but the novels constantly urged their readers to go beyond fiction. In so urging, the authors were not at all hypocritical; they were using fiction as a rung on the ladder.” (31)
“Although the novelists of this period now considered important are all male, from 1850 until well after the Civil War (some would say until the 1920s) the novel was chiefly a form of literary communication among women.” (32)
“The literary woman conceptualized authorship as a profession rather than a calling, as work and not art. Women authors tended not to think of themselves as artists or justify themselves in the language of art until the 1870s and after. This practical approach, along with their unclassic educations, had an inevitable effect on their work. It did not make the sorts of claims on its readers that ‘art’ does--the dimensions of formal self-consciousness, attachment to or quarrel with a grand tradition, aesthetic seriousness, are all missing.” (32)
“[Marion Harland’s] novels are about love and marriage in a way that those of the other women are not. As I have suggested earlier when considering the later novels of Susan Warner, the equation of woman’s fiction with ‘romance’ in the sense of a love story is a slightly later development in literary history and involves a certain narrowing of the broader social range of the first wave of woman’s fiction. The love story certainly grows out of this fiction, but its limited focus creates a rather different view of woman herself. By depicting her as wholly absorbed by romantic love, it returned partly to the eighteenth-century idea of woman living entirely in her emotions that the nineteenth-century women authors had vigorously attacked in their fiction. Romantic novels regarded independence as an endurance test, na basically unnatural and morbid condition….Compared to woman’s fiction of the 1850s, later romantic fiction is far less demanding of women; it represents a retreat from moral earnestness. But later still, as the nineteenth century came to an end, this fiction began to embody a self-expressive ethic, a feminine claim to pleasure and a rebellion against the Victorian ethic of obligation. This anti-Victorian idea of feminine freedom greatly complicated the literary picture, for against it the demands of the woman’s fiction of the 1850s could seem oppressive rather than liberating. To sum it up, woman’s fiction was a counterstatement to the fiction of sensibility and seduction of the late eighteenth century; the fiction of romantic love was a counterstatement to the moral earnestness of woman’s fiction and its ethic of responsibility to others.” (198, emphasis mine)
“Had [Caroline] Chesebro’ possessed the technical skill and sensitivity to language commensurate with her eccentric vision and her originality as a fabulator, she would have been an important American author. She knew that she was attempting something major, but she saw significance in her message rather than in the form in which she conveyed it and fell therefore into several traps. Sadly, her work suffers as fiction precisely to the degree that she was committed to a moral vision, for she sacrifices both story and style to a naive conception of how to communicate intensity and seriousness….Her purpose was to portray a world populated by questioning, troubled, serious, thinking, ethical people but she forgot that in real life people of this type would never put up with such harangues as she permits her characters to direct at each other. She reads therefore like an author for whom fiction is not a natural mode of expression.” (209)
“Like some of the other works considered in this study, St. Elmo [by Augusta Evans Wilson] has been approached by critics reluctantly, if at all, with a contempt proportioned to its success. Its reputation has been all but buried under a scorn it probably would have escaped if it only had the grace to fail. Understandably but naively, its critics seem to think that if Wilson had not written St. Elmo, her enormous audience would have made a best seller out of Moby-Dick or The Marble Faun instead. Within the genre of woman’s fiction there appears always to have been room for another success. These novels did not hurt the sales of Melville or Hawthorne. Our serious writers have always known themselves a select group writing for a special and limited audience but this knowledge has coexisted with the fantasy of writing a bestseller nonetheless. Such a contradiction is inherent in an economic system where the self-supporting writer must sell widely.” (276-277)
“The elite group of authors has always been understood in terms of greater intelligence and literary cultivation than the mass of readers; less often have the problems of our serious writers been recognized as sex-related, in that the writers have been mostly men and the readers mostly women. While these writers and the critics enlisted in their cause have suffered, hundreds of women authors (I do not exaggerate here) and millions of women readers have enjoyed a mutually profitable relationship. It is widely agreed that since the middle of the nineteenth century, no book can hope for popular success if it does not attract large numbers of women readers, because women were and are the majority of readers in America.” (277)
Anyway.
Baym argues that these writers of “woman’s fiction” (derogatorily called “sentimental fiction” and “domestic fiction” in scholarship) were immensely popular in their day, and made up a good chunk of the literary culture of the New Republic. Too much, if you’re a male writer, evidently. The questions of life in early America, the introduction of the psychological novel, and a quest for morality not found in the popular seduction novels of the day (*squints at Samuel Richardson*) contributed to the development of a new genre, which prized good, strong heroines (who experienced no character growth), good, strong men (who loved our heroines for their goodness and strength), foils (who died or lost their fortunes in disgrace), and ridiculously contrived plots.
One of the reasons woman’s fiction did not survive was because most of the novels were not well-written. As mentioned above, the heroines had already matured into perfect women and only needed to prove their crystalline morals during Trials™. Plots followed a few basic rhythms with little deviation. Romance was flat, and the endings usually found the lady a mother in her own home without much of an interior life. In some cases, Baym points out, the writing itself is poor. Caroline Chesebro’ is one instance of this; her novels sound very intriguing until you learn she was given to lengthy sermons in her novel, lest her readers miss the point. There are plenty of contradictions to this, but overall, the literary qualities that keep readers coming back over the centuries do not populate these novels. Something I look for as a reader is motivation, for both “good” and “bad” characters. Without it, I don’t know the character as a person. Surface-level motivations suffice not, which is why Joseph Andrews and I don’t get along. As novels intended to communicate good American morals in the period of the seduction novel and proliferating erotica, woman’s fiction did its job. “Novels” gained a bad reputation from the Clelland types, but authors like Sedgwick sought to redeem the form, which paved the way for future female writers’ contributions.
Baym gives us many examples of women who lived off their earnings by writing. A common misconception about women like Harriet Beecher Stowe** and Louisa May Alcott is that they were unusual in their day for making a living by their pens, that they were daring and groundbreaking and scandalous. Baym’s work effectively shows that they were not. In fact, reading through the plots and characters of novels in Woman’s Fiction helped me understand Alcott’s work even better, particularly A Garland for Girls, An Old-Fashioned Girl, and Rose in Bloom. Baym only briefly discusses the first volume of Little Women at the end of the book, but much more could be made of Alcott’s take on woman’s fiction and its move into children’s fiction. Alcott subverts the genre--her flighty antiheroines reform rather than dying in shame like those in woman’s fiction are wont to do--but the reader can trace the impact of woman’s fiction on Alcott’s work. She likely grew up reading it, and her mother Abba probably knew some of the authors. Besides Sedgwick and Augusta Evans, E.D.E.N. Southworth was the only author I had heard of in this genre, because of a note about “Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury” in Little Women. Southworth, however, came by all of her initials honestly, making me wonder what Alcott imagined for Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury.
Baym quotes two woman’s fiction authors who describe their self-concept as writers. Marion Harland wrote in her autobiography, “Mine is a story for the table and arm-chair under the reading lamp in the living-room, and not for the library shelves.” (32) Fanny Fern’s dedication for Rose Clark was to a particular situation:
When the frost curtains the windows, when the wind whistles fiercely at the key-hole, when the bright fire glows, and the tea-tray is removed, and father in his slippered feet lolls in his arm-chair; and mother with her nimble needle ‘makes auld claes look amaist as weel as new,’ and grandmamma draws closer to the chimney-corner, and Tommy with his plate of chestnuts nestles contentedly at her feet; then let my unpretending story be read. For such an hour, for such an audience, was it written. (32)
Who is missing from this image? The daughter, and dare I say, the one reading the book aloud to the family. Fern, at least, intended her work for an audience beyond females, but she intended it for family consumption in the home. It is no wonder Hawthorne was so perturbed by the prevalence of woman’s fiction in his time. These stories were reaching many more readers than his, gaining more cultural purchase than he had.
Reading Woman’s Fiction over 40 years after its publication, I like to think Baym’s plea has been heard. A college professor of mine recommended Sedgwick to me years ago, and my Penguin edition of A New England Tale was first published in 2003. As a scholar myself, the advice I give anyone looking for a good “in” is to find someone to write about who has a plethora of extant documentation, but who is underutilized in scholarship. That way, it’s very easy to offer something new to the field and have a unique angle of study, because few others are talking about that person, yet you have a lot of material to analyze. (I got this hot tip from a fellow student in my MA program, who wrote an award-winning thesis on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, a novelist mentioned in Woman's Fiction, but who did not fit into the genre.) Many, many women from the past fit this bill, and I’d definitely recommend the authors in Woman’s Fiction to budding literary scholars who don’t want to be the millionth scholar of Austen, Twain, Shakespeare, or what have you. It’s much harder to say something new about them than it is to say something new about an unremembered figure.
I’m not leaving Woman’s Fiction with a lengthy to-read list, but I will be looking into a few of the authors, and continuing to think about how this genre shaped fiction by women in the rest of the 19th century. The female authors examined here pioneered the respectable, middle-class, self-supporting author. Southworth was a single mother, Sedgwick a single woman. More often than not, however, these authors were married, and maintained their home lives alongside their writing lives. They were widely published, not always under pseudonyms, and earned well for their work. Their efforts laid the groundwork for upper-class American women to write, like Edith Wharton, and for middle-class writers like Alcott to live comfortably and respectably by their pens. Woman’s Fiction is not only important for literary studies, but also for understanding the lives of professional female writers and readers. Understanding what American women were reading in the 19th century helps us understand the generation that was known for widespread social activism and conflicted over suffrage. Baym’s argument pleasingly subverts the misconception that 19th-century women were repressed and unintellectual. Alcott was not an aberration from the norm. These women did their thinking in fiction, and tended a garden of American women’s writing that has continued to flourish for centuries.
*Theodore Sedgwick and Tapping Reeve were the legal representation for Elizabeth “Mumbet/Bett” Freeman and Brom, who successfully sued their enslaver for their freedom in 1781. Bett and Brom vs. Ashley was a groundbreaking case because it used the “free and equal” statement in the Massachusetts state constitution, and was later upheld in freedom cases. Freeman spent the rest of her life working for wages in the Sedgwick household, and is buried in the Sedgwick family plot.
**Baym posits that Stowe was not an author of woman’s fiction, because her work does not fit the conventions of the genre, and her work was not geared to a female audience. Some authors who wrote woman’s fiction also wrote outside the genre, such as Sedgwick.
-----
“Most of the American authors were middle-class women who needed money. As a general rule--although exceptions increased as the period wore on--only middle-class women had sufficient education to know how to write books, and only those who needed money attempted it. However, the unstable financial condition of American life ensured that there was a sizable group of such women and made their thematic concern with the problems of self-support pertinent to many readers.” (30)
“Like Benjamin Franklin before them, and Malcolm X after them, they saw literacy as the foundation of liberation. Since this message was embodied in fiction, it supposed an audience already literate; but the novels constantly urged their readers to go beyond fiction. In so urging, the authors were not at all hypocritical; they were using fiction as a rung on the ladder.” (31)
“Although the novelists of this period now considered important are all male, from 1850 until well after the Civil War (some would say until the 1920s) the novel was chiefly a form of literary communication among women.” (32)
“The literary woman conceptualized authorship as a profession rather than a calling, as work and not art. Women authors tended not to think of themselves as artists or justify themselves in the language of art until the 1870s and after. This practical approach, along with their unclassic educations, had an inevitable effect on their work. It did not make the sorts of claims on its readers that ‘art’ does--the dimensions of formal self-consciousness, attachment to or quarrel with a grand tradition, aesthetic seriousness, are all missing.” (32)
“[Marion Harland’s] novels are about love and marriage in a way that those of the other women are not. As I have suggested earlier when considering the later novels of Susan Warner, the equation of woman’s fiction with ‘romance’ in the sense of a love story is a slightly later development in literary history and involves a certain narrowing of the broader social range of the first wave of woman’s fiction. The love story certainly grows out of this fiction, but its limited focus creates a rather different view of woman herself. By depicting her as wholly absorbed by romantic love, it returned partly to the eighteenth-century idea of woman living entirely in her emotions that the nineteenth-century women authors had vigorously attacked in their fiction. Romantic novels regarded independence as an endurance test, na basically unnatural and morbid condition….Compared to woman’s fiction of the 1850s, later romantic fiction is far less demanding of women; it represents a retreat from moral earnestness. But later still, as the nineteenth century came to an end, this fiction began to embody a self-expressive ethic, a feminine claim to pleasure and a rebellion against the Victorian ethic of obligation. This anti-Victorian idea of feminine freedom greatly complicated the literary picture, for against it the demands of the woman’s fiction of the 1850s could seem oppressive rather than liberating. To sum it up, woman’s fiction was a counterstatement to the fiction of sensibility and seduction of the late eighteenth century; the fiction of romantic love was a counterstatement to the moral earnestness of woman’s fiction and its ethic of responsibility to others.” (198, emphasis mine)
“Had [Caroline] Chesebro’ possessed the technical skill and sensitivity to language commensurate with her eccentric vision and her originality as a fabulator, she would have been an important American author. She knew that she was attempting something major, but she saw significance in her message rather than in the form in which she conveyed it and fell therefore into several traps. Sadly, her work suffers as fiction precisely to the degree that she was committed to a moral vision, for she sacrifices both story and style to a naive conception of how to communicate intensity and seriousness….Her purpose was to portray a world populated by questioning, troubled, serious, thinking, ethical people but she forgot that in real life people of this type would never put up with such harangues as she permits her characters to direct at each other. She reads therefore like an author for whom fiction is not a natural mode of expression.” (209)
“Like some of the other works considered in this study, St. Elmo [by Augusta Evans Wilson] has been approached by critics reluctantly, if at all, with a contempt proportioned to its success. Its reputation has been all but buried under a scorn it probably would have escaped if it only had the grace to fail. Understandably but naively, its critics seem to think that if Wilson had not written St. Elmo, her enormous audience would have made a best seller out of Moby-Dick or The Marble Faun instead. Within the genre of woman’s fiction there appears always to have been room for another success. These novels did not hurt the sales of Melville or Hawthorne. Our serious writers have always known themselves a select group writing for a special and limited audience but this knowledge has coexisted with the fantasy of writing a bestseller nonetheless. Such a contradiction is inherent in an economic system where the self-supporting writer must sell widely.” (276-277)
“The elite group of authors has always been understood in terms of greater intelligence and literary cultivation than the mass of readers; less often have the problems of our serious writers been recognized as sex-related, in that the writers have been mostly men and the readers mostly women. While these writers and the critics enlisted in their cause have suffered, hundreds of women authors (I do not exaggerate here) and millions of women readers have enjoyed a mutually profitable relationship. It is widely agreed that since the middle of the nineteenth century, no book can hope for popular success if it does not attract large numbers of women readers, because women were and are the majority of readers in America.” (277)
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