Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers 0367204290, 9780367204297

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 American Women’s Books in the British Literary Marketplace
2 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold in Britain
3 Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in and beyond the “English Craze”
4 Eyes to See Them: British Responses to Native Americans in the Works of Helen Hunt Jackson and Zitkala-Ša
5 Touching the Chords: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her British Fans
6 The Customs of that Other Country: Reading Edith Wharton in Britain
Epilogue
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Transatlantic Footholds

Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyzes British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists, and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women, and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as “women” was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-toeast. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of “America.” “America,” their responses prove, is a transnational construct. Stephanie Palmer is a Senior Lecturer of Nineteenth Century American Literature at Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, United Kingdom. She is the author of Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (2009) and articles in Symbiosis, Studies in Travel Writing, Women’s Writing, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Pedagogy, and the essay collection, Transatlantic Conversations (2017).

Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature Edited by Susan Castillo, King’s College London

23 Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature Edited by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger 24 Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture Children of Empire Denis Jonnes 25 Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction Peter Ferry 26 Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism Critical Imaginaries for a Global Age Edited by Aparajita Nanda 27 Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature Emma Staniland 28 Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture Edited by Tara Stubbs and Doug Haynes 29 Richard Wright and Transnationalism New Dimensions to Modern American Expatriate Literature Mamoun Alzoubi 30 Transatlantic Footholds Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers Stephanie Palmer

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Transatlantic Footholds Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers

Stephanie Palmer

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Stephanie Palmer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-20429-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-26142-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

vii ix

Introduction 1 1 American Women’s Books in the British Literary Marketplace 28 2 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold in Britain 48 3 Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in and beyond the “English Craze” 72 4 Eyes to See Them: British Responses to Native Americans in the Works of Helen Hunt Jackson and Zitkala-Ša 106 5 Touching the Chords: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her British Fans 135 6 The Customs of that Other Country: Reading Edith Wharton in Britain 159 Epilogue 192 Selected Bibliography Index

199 215

List of Figures

3.1 The paper cover of the 1890 David Douglas edition of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s A Humble Romance and Other Stories 88 3.2 The frontispiece of the 1893 Ward, Lock, and Bowden edition of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s A Humble Romance and Other Stories 89 4.1 The cover of the 1914 Sampson Low edition of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona 116 4.2 The cover of the 1901 Ginn and Company edition of Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends 117 6.1 Ad for The House of Mirth 166 6.2 Academy review of The Custom of the Country 173

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the generous support received from many sources. Initial research began with a trip funded by Bilkent University to do research at the British Library and present a paper at the Transatlantic Women Conference at Oxford University. The enthusiasm for the transatlanticism of American women writers at that conference was infectious. Several research trips followed, sponsored by the British Association of American Studies and Nottingham Trent University, to the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Art Library, the Women’s Library, the Library of the Society of Friends in London, the Bromley House Library in Nottingham, Butler Library at Columbia University, Houghton Library at Harvard, Newstead Abbey, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I thank the staff at these libraries for their assistance, especially Karla Nielsen at Columbia University and Helen Symington at the National Library of Scotland. Jane Bonnell at Nottingham Trent introduced me to the databases British Newspapers and British Periodicals where I found so many of the reviews discussed in this book, and the interlibrary loan staff at Nottingham Trent have been consistently quick and thorough when finding old editions of books and periodicals. I was also fortunate to be granted two semesters of sabbatical leave from my teaching duties at Nottingham Trent to finish this project. An early version of two-thirds of Chapter 3 appeared as “‘No More Appreciative Readers than in England’: Anglo-Saxonism and Dissent in the English Craze for Mary Wilkins Freeman” in Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 16, no. 2 (October 2012): 225–44. A slightly shorter version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Heaven and Manufacturing: Political Dissent in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold in Britain” in Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World, edited by Beth L. Lueck, Sirpa Salenius, and Nancy Lusignan Schultz (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2017). I thank Symbiosis and the editors of the book volume for taking an interest in my work and allowing me to reprint this material here. For permission to quote from their collections, I am grateful to Columbia University Rare

x Acknowledgments Book and Manuscript Library, Houghton Library, Schlesinger Library, and the National Library of Scotland. The letter from William H. Briggs quoted in Chapter 1 is copyright © 1925 HarperCollins Publishers and has been quoted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers. Every attempt has been made to find the copyright holder for David Douglas’s scrapbook. Should any copyright holder be found, I would be grateful if he or she could send correspondence. The editors and readers at Routledge have been enthusiastic about this project from the start. Several scholars have listened to my conference papers, taken an interest in my travels, and maintained collegiality from conference to conference, including Beth L. Lueck, Rita Bode, ­Melissa Homestead, Sirpa Salenius, Brigitte Bailey, Phyllis Cole, Virginia ­R icard, Monika Elbert, Kristin Allukian, Janet Floyd, Cécile Roudeau, Myrto Drizou, Katherine Adams, and Kate Culkin. Adam Wood and Marie Cheetham were interns in the initial SPUR (Support for Undergraduate Researchers) Project in 2012 that made evident the viability of this project. Their patience in spending five weeks gathering reviews for long-term research was invaluable. Sandrine Bergès and Louise Barry provided French translations. My colleagues at Nottingham Trent have listened to me discuss the wonders of reviewing, and I thank them, especially Georgina Lock, Nicole Thiara, Daniel Cordle, Catherine Clay, and Tim Youngs. Along with Rita Bode, Tim Youngs, Victoria Lamont, Myrto Drizou, and Catherine Clay, Cathryn Halverson has read parts of the manuscript. Cathryn Halverson deserves special thanks for always answering frantic e-mails. Cameron and Adrian must be thanked for being good and amusing, and Fergus for always being there.

Introduction

American women writers have always had a place in Britain. Victorian and Edwardian Britons admired and venerated American literature. They were interested in both the vitality of particular authors and the prospect of bearing witness to the formation of new national institutions that represented one version of the modern world. Women writers seemed at the forefront of American literature, of obvious significance to British readers. For example, their books could be found in country houses. Today’s visitors to Newstead Abbey, the home of Lord Byron, walk through rooms decorated to represent the tastes of a later and more solvent owner, William Frederick Webb, who was a British army officer and African explorer (later High Sheriff of Nottingham) who purchased the abbey in 1861. The shelves are filled with beautiful nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions of books in history, politics, and literature. A small portion of the literature titles are by US authors. There are British editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Susan Warner’s Queechy, John Greenleaf Whittier’s Poetical Works, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s best seller, The Gates Ajar. In a Ward, Lock, and Tyler edition, The Gates Ajar is inscribed with the name of Frederick Webb’s wife, Emilia Jane, in 1872. Emilia Jane Webb bore seven children and lost one in infancy and was thus perhaps a typical reader of this book, which is about mourning lost loved ones.1 This presence of American women’s literature on the bookshelves of a wealthy household would not have surprised the Victorians. This book seeks to explain what American women writers individually and as a group meant to some Britons in their day. However unremarkable the Victorians would have found the presence of popular American women writers in a grand country house, their presence might give pause to many Britons or Americans today. Anglocentrism in both countries fosters the belief that British literary culture is more substantial than American literary culture, even though there is a long history of Britons of all classes enjoying American literature. Much of the scholarship on American women writers assumes that their literature was written for Americans and about the United States unless

2  Introduction the writer is a cosmopolitan exception to the rule. Outside literary studies, in British culture at large, both the US literature and the idea of “America” itself are associated with masculinity in many guises: frontier violence, heroic individualism, sensational prose, or public expressions of private selfhood that respectable women could not imitate without risk. British university students often believe that a novel, poem, or play counts as “American” only if they can see how it reinforces or problematizes the American dream; the questions they bring to bear on “women’s literature,” such as the rise of feminist consciousness or the expression of a specifically female perspective on society, may seem to be separate questions. Transatlantic Footholds seeks to help readers rid themselves of the habit of considering American women writers as first and only for Americans. Drawing on reviews in magazines and newspapers, publishers’ archives in both countries, book editions, newspaper and magazine reviews, library records, and fan letters, this book shows that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain long before the emergence of academic feminist criticism. This interest dovetailed with an interest in the New Woman writers of roughly 1880–1900, but it was broader, encompassing a wider variety of periodicals and interpretive communities than that narrowly defined phenomenon. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s writing helped change the predominant conviction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Transatlantic Footholds focuses on the critical reception of select women writers. In the introduction, I explain why reviewers’ responses to these writers are important and how the book revises certain preconceptions about the national identity of feminist literary criticism and the leading role that women took within transatlanticism. I also survey reviews of books by white and ethnic American women writers who were active in the two generations after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s day, when she and the other sentimental novelists convinced Britons that American women could be artists as well as domestic moralists.2 As popular literature, American writers, including women writers, had a great deal more than a foothold in Britain. As Chapter 1 makes clear, the lack of copyright protection for foreign writers before 1891 meant that American books were cheaply available in Britain throughout the nineteenth century, and the 1891 Chase Act did not end the importing and republishing of American books in Britain. The writers studied here, however, were not just popular but literary writers. The US women writers of the period after the US Civil War have been periodized as literary artists participating in the turn toward realism, regionalism, and naturalism rather than writers of sentimentalism and domesticity.3 The critical reception is important for them because they wanted to win both a wide readership and critical acclaim. For these generations of writers

Introduction  3 in particular, then, reviews were crucial steps toward them achieving their goals. Reviews framed their texts for British readers. Reviews serve as a key window into the type of reading that I call “transatlantic reading.” When a book was foreign, the reviewer’s task of orienting the reader to the text’s coordinates was especially important. Reviewers brought their local quarrels and concerns to bear on the American books they were reviewing. In reviewing, the freshest, least reflective beliefs about national traditions and women’s place within them were expressed, revealed, and quite often rendered pungent and interesting. Reviewers were flexible in how they approached a new writer. Since most of the American women fiction writers discussed published books under their own names that were imported or reprinted from an American edition, reviewers usually knew that they were reading a woman writer, and they often knew that they were reading an American. Reviewers—who were both male and female and often wrote anonymously—sometimes focused on a text’s structure, setting, subject matter, or style, sometimes on national traits, and sometimes on the woman question as it was being worked out in different contexts. They viewed the two questions of building nations and developing women as interrelated. They read for several issues at once, interpreting these writers as artists, women, or Americans. Granted, their notion of who counted as “women” was limited by race and class; white women’s works were hailed as contributions to the woman question, but ethnic women’s works were not. White or Native Indian reform writers failed to galvanize British readers to care about Indian reform as much as these readers cared about abolitionism before the US Civil War or lynching and civil rights for African Americans thereafter. With these important qualifications, one can conclude that reviewers eagerly read US women writers to learn about how other modern cultures worked out their social problems. They praised American women not only for the freshness and topicality of their content but for the vitality and unpredictability of their style. The late nineteenth century was a time of experiment in prose fiction styles, to be sure, but American women were singled out for their ability to mix high and low diction, biting satire and deep feeling, telling detail, and wide social scope. American women prose writers were praised for a style that was, in C. Kegan Paul’s words, “nervous and pure”—neurasthenia, or as nineteenth-­century neurologist George Miller Beard called it, “American nervousness,” being in this respect a positive attribute.4 All the reviews discussed in this book touch on larger hopes and fears in respect to issues such as the increase in literacy, the furthering of the emancipation of women, and the extension of enfranchisement beyond the propertied classes. In this respect, the study is typical of the field of book history. The chapters contest the common critical assumption that British critics were mostly derisive about American literature.5 This reputation

4  Introduction rests primarily on British reviews of the American Renaissance writers writing before the Civil War, but beginning in the 1860s, the culture of British reviewing had changed. Scholars identify the period of 1860 to the 1910s as a golden age for reviewing in Britain.6 Since the early nineteenth century, the periodical review had become an accepted and well-renumerated form of intelligent discourse. Periodicals selected only the best books to review, and they allowed reviewers to use reviews as a springboard for their own ideas.7 In the 1860s, the increasing number of magazines and newspapers meant that men and women of letters could earn a professional wage through writing reviews. The gradual end to the convention of anonymous periodical contributions meant that reviewers had to be responsible and modulate their tone accordingly. Hence, the reputation in American literary history for caustic British reviewers responds mainly to the situation in British reviewing before the 1860s, not the period in question. Whereas earlier in the century, reviewers had been opinionated and politically motivated, empowered by a cloak of anonymity to cast aspersions on authors without analyzing their works carefully, by the 1860s, reviewers had adopted “a more modulated, reflective and professionally delivered critical discourse, disseminated through an increasingly varied and mainly non-politically aligned periodical press.”8 Reception studies specialists rightly warn that trained reviewers and critics read differently than untrained readers do.9 Indeed, reviews are an imperfect record of how the trained journalist himself or herself reads a book, much less how untrained readers might have read a book. Reviews are expected to be polished and logical, and today’s critics and authors often find them too wedded to critical conventions to consider ideas that are difficult to articulate or too competitive to express simple pleasures.10 I disagree with this largely negative assessment of the kind of record of reading that reviews provide the scholar. Because reviews have been written down and are widely accessible (particularly in an age of digitized databases), they provide a telling insight into how professional readers received these books. While the Reading Experience Database 1450–1945 is uncovering some candid remarks about particular volumes, reviews provide a record of how journalists read a wide variety of volumes.11 The reviewers were candid and sharp and hence they expressed their feelings. They revealed their blind spots, even when they sought to be fair or charming. They often lost interest in the second half of a long novel or ignored difficult-to-read characters. Reviewers were not all Oxford dons; they were often aspiring fiction writers themselves, and they did not pronounce judgments from a particularly high rung on the social ladder. To the contrary, specific critics like the Scottish poet William Sharp (who later wrote under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod), or the Irish writer and politician Stephen Lucius Gwynn wrote probing reviews of American women writers as part of their own transatlantic footholds, their own fascination with and identification

Introduction  5 with the other side. Despite the omnipresence of American literature in Britain, reviewers read American literature as part of a broader action of dissent from local practices and assumptions. The diversity of the reviews calls for a close analysis of particular cases. Reviewers do not respond only to the text but to the book, with its cover, illustrations, paratexts, paper, typesetting, and most especially the fact of its existence, the fact that a book by an American in a handsome, reputable British book edition had landed on a weekly magazine’s book table and was worthy of further comment.12 Therefore, the chapters identify which works by particular authors were serialized, imported in book form, or granted new British editions, drawing on publisher’s archives as well as an examination of the editions themselves. This information can begin to reveal which class and gender of readers might have been expected to read these authors, how much money publishers expected individuals or libraries to spend, and whether the authors were considered candidates for immortality. The exact sales figures for each volume discussed have proven difficult to come by, because many of these authors were not considered the publishing house’s most important authors when records were preserved. In any case, accurate information about the readership cannot be obtained from sales figures alone, because readers of all classes shared books in this era.13 In some cases, such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s short story collections of the early 1890s, the numbers sold were low in comparison to those of many novels, but the buzz about the author was so emphatic that reviewers found it necessary to comment on it. Some of this work has been completed for some of the featured authors by previous scholars, but no study has brought them together as a group and demonstrated their interrelated importance in Britain. All the authors could have been granted more attention, and there is significant reception that remains unexamined. This study’s focus on a single national market (Britain) and a single foreign literature (US) calls into question simplistic notions of a monolithically “British” response to American women’s writing. American women’s writing circulated in networks with diverse nodes.14 For example, Phelps’s pietistic literature attracted particular attention in Scotland where there was a like tradition of pietistic writing. Freeman’s nonconformist characters raised more anxieties in England than in the United States due to debates around who should control religion in the newly established primary schools.

Feminist Literary Criticism and the Atlantic Divide British reviewers were impressed by American women writers like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Edith Wharton, and they viewed them as intrinsically important to the American literary tradition. When the study of Anglophone literature moved into the universities after World War I, women writers dropped out of the canon.15

6  Introduction Feminist literary criticism has brought them back into the canon, but it has also contributed to a sharpening division in the way that British and American literatures are studied. In some of the earliest books on feminist literary criticism, including Louise Bernikow, edited, The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950 (1974), Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women’s Writing (1975), Ellen Moers, Literary Women (1976), Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (1978), and Mary Jacobus, edited, Women Writing and Writing About Women (1979), critics treated American women writers alongside writers from Britain, France, Russia, and Scandinavia. Hence, the women’s literary tradition was initially conceptualized as transnational. As feminist literary criticism has become more specialized, however, the study of American women writers has grown more distinct. Scholars or students today are more likely to draw on such monographs as Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820– 70 (1978), Elaine Showalter, Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (1991), Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1991), Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (2003), Anne E. Boyd’s Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (2004), or Charlotte J. Rich’s Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era (2009). This turn toward the nationally specific in feminist literary criticism is not an example of American exceptionalism. Rather, it is a product of diverging feminist goals in different countries. The connection between the popular women’s liberation movement and academic feminist literary criticism was stronger in the United States than it was in Great Britain before the 1980s. British women who joined the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s knew about the emergence of a self-conscious “feminist literary criticism,” but they generally followed socialist branches of academic feminism instead.16 Socialist feminists took feminist literary critics to task for not interrogating their categories enough on the pages of US journals as well, as evidenced by an MLA Forum organized by the MLA Commission on Women whose essays were published in the journal College English in May 1971. Annis Pratt’s essay “The New Feminist Criticism” is the first publication to appear under the key term “feminist literary criticism” in the ABELL or MLA Bibliographies. Pratt proposes that the new feminist literary criticism can recuperate women’s literature by combing the archive for feminist or feminine works and developing bibliographical, textual, contextual, or archetypal modes of feminist reading.17 Quoting Pratt in an essay in the same journal issue, Lillian S. Robinson grows sarcastic about the ability of feminist critics to study “context” outside

Introduction  7 of a Marxist conception of the material determination of both circumstances and consciousness: “I think I understand what ‘context’ might mean when freed of sociological terminology, but I cannot deduce what kind of criticism it might inspire.”18 Some of the most influential British feminist literary critics like Cora Kaplan and Helen Taylor are socialist feminists like Robinson, and their methods for analyzing female consciousness and circumstance draw from that tradition. In the United States, the calls for a transnational women’s literary tradition became more measured by the late 1970s because feminist scholars were taking each other to task for poor generalizations about the woman writer across time, place, and status. Black feminists insisted that feminists consider other forms of oppression when theorizing the concept of the female imagination. For example, Barbara Smith in “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1977) accused white women critics of acting as if they did not know that black women writers and black lesbian writers existed: It is galling that ostensible feminists and acknowledged lesbians have been so blinded to the implications of any womanhood that is not white womanhood and that they have yet to struggle with the deep racism in themselves that is at the source of this blindness.19 In A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977), Elaine Showalter questioned Spack’s concept of a “female imagination” that draws directly from biology or psychology; rather, Showalter argues, “the female literary tradition comes from the still-evolving relationships between women writers and their society.”20 To avoid essentialist psychology, then, Showalter limited herself to white, middle- or upper-class English novelists and “their society,” meaning their national society. Henceforth, studies of women writers became nationalized. Nina Baym’s influential study, Woman’s Fiction (1978), for example, even more decisively linked the concept of women’s writing to a specific nation and time period. Showalter advocated moving beyond a study of the major writers to examine popular fiction, and Baym took this approach even further. Departing radically from the canon to consider then forgotten writers like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Susan Warner, Baym argued that their novels offered a limited and pragmatic feminism because they proposed an individualism for women. In their focus on “American women’s writing,” both black and white US feminist literary critics were invested in revising the definitions of “Americanness” that circulated in US English departments. 21 After these radical questions about the viability of a transnational women’s literary tradition, then, it became impossible to discuss “women’s writing” without qualifying the term, and the proliferation of references to “American,” “black,” or “white” women’s writing in

8  Introduction book titles and literary societies today has to be read in light of the seriousness of this conflict internal to literary criticism, not as a form of US exceptionalism. In Britain, feminist literary criticism and the canon expansion it has fostered did not have such a firm place in higher education during the era of the theorization of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. Showalter, Baym, Smith, and others usually did not advocate reading women’s literature because it was great but because, in Smith’s words, it taught readers to recognize that women’s books “contain a stunningly accurate record of the impact of patriarchal values and practice upon the lives of women, and more significantly, that literature by women provides essential insights into female experience.”22 Feminist literary criticism had a particular role to play in the American university. By many accounts, this role was to ease female undergraduates into university study in ways that affirmed their experience rather than merely assimilating them to the dominant culture. Showalter’s own contribution to the May 1971 College English issue suggested that scholars introduce women’s writing into freshman or sophomore composition or general education classes, where texts are generally selected “for their timeliness, or their relevance, or their power to involve the reader, rather than for their absolute standing in the literary canon.”23 Patricia Meyer Spacks similarly suggested that Wellesley College students elected to take a freshman– sophomore literature colloquium called “Woman Writers and Woman’s Problems” out of their “adolescent” sense of grievance with the world.24 The transatlantic novelist and poet Anne Stevenson wisely noted that when writing as a woman, with a mixture of “fear of inadequacy” and “knowledge of her superiority,” Sylvia Plath exhibited features found throughout American male poets as well, from Lowell and Berryman to Whitman—a point that demonstrates how neatly feminist literary pedagogy fits within US liberal culture. 25 This space for easing female undergraduates into university study did not exist as ubiquitously in British universities of the 1970s and 1980s, when a smaller percentage of British students attended university. British students entered universities as majors, and they began by studying literature as literature, not as a springboard for critical thinking or self-­ expression. When studying women’s writing from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, students were more likely to conduct a “great writers” approach than the approach that Showalter advocated in A Literature of Their Own, which traces “patterns of influence and response from one generation to the next” and begins to “challenge the periodicity of orthodox literary history.”26 They are more likely to read Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton as great writers than to trace networks of influence between a wider variety of women writers broadly identified as New Woman, such as Emma Frances Brooke, Pauline Hopkins, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, S. Alice Callahan, Sui Sin Far,

Introduction  9 Anzia Yezierska, or Ella Hepworth Dixon. This book seeks to trouble that Anglo-American divide in conceptualizing the transnational women’s tradition by demonstrating that many American women writers traditionally considered relevant only to Americanists had a transatlantic reputation worthy of consideration.

Transatlanticism and American Women Writers The argument that British critics played a role in promoting and analyzing the literature of American women redirects trends in transatlantic literary study as well. Scholars from a number of sub-disciplines have long examined how literary works circulate around the Atlantic rim, but the more organized version of transatlanticism that has emerged over the past 20 years has focused attention on undoing “nationalist master-­ narratives.”27 Among the movements that have been obscured, the westto-east trajectory or what the 2017 Symbiosis conference theme calls the “eastward counterflow” of American books and ideas into Britain must be considered a suppressed aspect of Atlantic literary culture. 28 When Robert Weisbuch argued that Romanticism in both Britain and the United States can be characterized as a double cross, he nonetheless argued that the conflicted psychic investment in talking back to the other country while fashioning oneself as a representative national was far more important for American writers than it was for British writers of the same generation. 29 To be sure, the postcolonial mixture of self-assertion and inferiority complex that motivated the Romantics still affected American writers of the turn into the twentieth century. American writers viewed their success in Britain as a valued symbol of their lasting artistic merit. When fearing that Freeman’s Pembroke (1894) would receive less attention than other novels of the day, the New England writer Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote to a friend: It is a rather significant fact that it finds more appreciation in England than America, which is perhaps due to the fact of England’s undeniable ability to tell a good thing and not be deceived by outward show, which I cannot help thinking that Time will prove to be a certain percentage of Trilby.30 Edith Wharton also made a point of reading British reviews because she felt that they had the greatest depth and seriousness. 31 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s autobiography at once boasts about her family relationship with Queen Victoria and about her ability to represent her upstart nation well when dining out in England. With the Fabians, when “the talk drifted into animadversions on the U.S.A.,” George Bernard Shaw “caustically remarked that he supposed I would put all this into

10  Introduction the newspapers when I reached home,” but she fashioned a reply about standing for peace that dissipated the remark in laughter.32 The British reviewers that this book analyzes generally did not share the American writers’ mixture of self-assertion and inferiority complex. They largely commended American writers for finally producing a worthy literature. Their analyses were largely discerning and admiring. Granted, there remained some bile about American upstarts in the British periodical press, particularly in the weekly magazines, which strove to review only the best books and warn readers away from books that were not worthy of being read, and particularly in Conservative-leaning publications. But reviews of individual volumes tended to concede that they were good books. Occasional grumbles appear that the Americans are taking over a particular genre or sub-genre. The Times noted that the American writers Mary E. Wilkins (later Freeman), Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Douglas Wiggin were known and appreciated almost as readily in Britain as they were in their own country, as if their British popularity were something odd and remarkable.33 A speaker in Belfast complained that Sabbath schools and congregational libraries stock the American author Augusta Evans but no Irish Presbyterian writers. 34 Such remarks, though, were rare. There is the possibility that British praise for American writing was a form of Anglo-Saxonism, the self-conscious construction of bonds between Britons and Americans on the putative basis of shared bloodlines.35 I consider this possibility in many of the chapters, but ultimately, approval of the Anglo-Saxonist ingredients of American literature seemed only a small part of the overall praise for the writing. Other scholarship concurs that the Americans began to matter a great deal to the British in this period and that the British were not particularly nervous about this. Tracing references to the United States or America in British newspapers, Bob Nicholson notes a significant upturn between 1870 and 1890, which happened prior to the foreign policy rapprochement of the 1890s, and was likely motivated by cultural trends rather than political events.36 Studying British travel writing about the United States, Robert Frankel argues that after James Bryce’s American Commonwealth (1888), travel writers became measured and constructive, debating theories of the connections between the United States and Britain and pondering whether they were based on a shared Anglo-Saxon race, language, or political institutions.37 Paul Giles’ monograph Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature recasts British literary culture of the past 300 years as looking westward in ways that call into question Britain’s internal solidity.38 Elaine Showalter claims that the 1890s saw a “turning of the tide” in Anglophone women’s writing in which British women writers began to consider American women writers as models.39

Introduction  11 Both Laura M. Stevens and Joseph Rezek have identified different paradigms of transatlanticism, and their schemas, while diverging in some ways, can be used in tandem. One paradigm views the Atlantic as the space of modernity, the space in which capitalism, slavery, empire, nationalism, the Enlightenment, and revolution unfolded. This paradigm, Rezek argues, “risks homogenizing the complexity of the past through examining texts that illustrate a particular theoretical perspective.”40 Another paradigm views the Atlantic as what Stevens calls a “seamless garment.”41 For example, many of the scholars who published influential volumes in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including Meredith McGill, Amanda Claybaugh, and Lucy Delap, treat the British and American literary markets as one literary market rather than two.42 These scholars attribute this approach to their focus on the literary marketplace, which was composed of publishers who were opening offices in the late nineteenth century on other sides of the Atlantic to sell their books and periodicals, and which was characterized by what McGill calls the culture of reprinting, in which items from the other country’s press were reprinted everywhere. Many of the close readings of women’s transatlantic travel coming out of the United States, such as the essays in Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, edited by Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, or Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World, edited by Beth L. Lueck, Sirpa Salenius, and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, have been published in this era, and their sense of the supportive rather than competitive network between women writers informs their analysis.43 Transatlantic Footholds views the Atlantic differently, as a community fully aware that it was characterized by crossings, comparisons, and geopolitical distances. This book draws on the transatlantic paradigm that Laura M. Stevens calls a “circulatory system,” in which even the distinctiveness of any national culture can only be understood by attending to the transnational currents running through it.44 Nearly all the actors analyzed in this study, whether writers, editors, publishers, critics, or fans, continued to think in terms of nations and national differences. Playful references to nationality and enmity were common, and fantasies of “America” inform the discussion even when the focus is on women’s rights. This is most evident when one reads reviews in their original magazine or newspaper appearance. Paying attention to what Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker call the “periodical codes” of matters like typeface and periodicity, I have found that American women’s books were often reviewed without much reference to nationality.45 Reviews appeared under such generic headings as “A Book of the Hour,” “Novels of the Week,” “New Novels,” and “Novels and Novelettes.”

12  Introduction Very often, however, they were reviewed under headings like “American Books” or “American Literature.”

Reception Theory and the British Literary Marketplace This book draws on reception theory to shift the critical focus from writers and their historical contexts toward readers and their historical contexts. It emphasizes that, in Michele Moylan’s words, texts mean differently when they are performed differently.46 British book editions and periodical serializations changed how American women’s writing was read. This focus enables me to test some of the theories of a transnational women’s network. The following chapters demonstrate that women writers sought out women writers, women journalists worked hard to acquire a copy of a feminist text to review, and women of letters spurred each other to increasingly feminist fictions. Women reviewers often operated under cover, publishing anonymously, and aspiring to judge texts without revealing their own gender to the reader or signaling their own feminist politics.47 Yet although the term “feminist” does not appear in these reviews until the late 1890s, the term captures the sentiment articulated in the network far earlier. The chapters also offer evidence that both male and female British reviewers were invested in reviewing American women writers and debating the significance of their work for the glory of their nation and their gender.48 Despite the common appearance of American books on book series about “English” authors, and the normalcy of the concept of the category of literature in English in both countries throughout the century, the nationality of the author had clear practical and legal consequences in many segments of the literary marketplace.49 When the founding partner of the Macmillan Publishing House, Alexander Macmillan, read Helen Hunt Jackson’s sentimental novel, Ramona, he referred to it as “the American novel,” an identification clearly relevant because it was a novel already vetted by Jackson’s US publisher, Roberts Brothers of Boston.50 He and other publishers were aware that novels like hers had been completed and vetted by the time they read them, and they generally read them with a view to how to price and package them for their domestic audience, not how to improve them through further substantial revision. There were exceptions to this rule. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868) was abridged and emended three times, but the practice of emendation was frowned upon by reviewers and ceased in the late nineteenth century. Edith Wharton’s New York editions of her novels were often printed with errors that she asked her British publishers to correct, and Frederick Macmillan, the British publisher with whom she worked the longest, revised his editions accordingly.51 For the purposes of most British publishers, the novels were always identified as American books, and reviewers shared this assumption.

Introduction  13 This project seeks to theorize the concept of transatlantic reading. Classic reception theory theorizes an abstract reader who reads across historical, but not geopolitical, distance. Hans Robert Jauss encourages critics to become aware of how the audience of a text changes over time, not space or culture.52 Wolfgang Iser describes a more dynamic relationship between a text and a reader. For him, a literary work has only a virtual existence that requires the reader to become a divided self: “[a]s the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text, and relates the different views and patterns to one another, he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too.”53 By reading these foreign texts, the reviewers set themselves in motion. Scholars who read the reviews watch the reviewers struggle with the question of whether the window into American life as offered by one realist or naturalist novel is accurate or topical. It becomes clear in the chapters that follow that the reviewers were consciously reading across geographical, national, and gendered differences. They struggled to make sense of distant material and considered anew how to make sense of their own context and society. Although classic reception theorists have been criticized for considering readers only as abstractions, not a group of people whose practices and tastes must be reconstructed through archival evidence and interpretation, 54 Iser’s model of the text acting upon the reader seems appropriate to a study that wishes to maintain the category of the author as an original producer and an active broker in the communications circuit. The book grants the credit due to American women authors, some of whom are currently only considered part of what Karen L. Kilcup satirically calls the “soft canon” of American literature, a canon unlikely to have international reach. 55 Their texts acted upon the British reviewers and significantly challenged reviewers’ ideas. Most especially, their texts challenged ideas of what fiction should be: at the beginning of this period, fiction was supposed to be long, sometimes still published in multiple volumes, and by the end of it, short stories such as the ones that Mary Wilkins wrote were considered a serious art form, and critics struggled to name what Edith Wharton’s short novels should be called. The brevity of American women’s books is one of the key ways they made an impact on the British literary market. There was no exclusive periodical home for discussions of womanhood and literature. The topic interested all segments of the market, from Conservative to radical, high to low. The periodicals that were most likely to print substantial reviews of most of the literature featured in this study were the weeklies the Academy, the Athenaeum, the Saturday Review, and the Speaker.56 The Academy was a monthly review of literature in its founding of 1869 but a weekly from 1874 until its demise in 1915. Under different editors, it shifted its political leaning from

14  Introduction Liberal to Conservative, and its reviews of American women were substantial and often fair, despite its tendency in the early twentieth century to dismiss some Wharton titles that it considered an affront to moral taste. The Athenaeum (1828–1921) was a comparatively Liberal weekly focusing on literature and criticism. Marysa Demoor has traced how the weekly was especially hospitable to women reviewers.57 Whether reviewers were male or female (not all reviewers have been identified by the periodical’s marked file), the Athenaeum was the most sympathetic of the weeklies toward women writers who mixed serious craft with feminine subject matter, although its reviewers often complained about American spelling. Although the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art (1855–1938) had a reputation for misogyny and acerbity in the mid-century, and it sometimes poked fun at the number of spinsters and cats in Freeman’s fiction, many of its reviews of American women’s writing were substantial and even tempered.58 The Speaker (1890–1907) was a Liberal weekly whose contributors included G.K. Chesterton and Henry James, and it eventually merged with the Nation and the Athenaeum. The Spectator (1828–), from 1861 to 1925 under Liberal editorship, and the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) commented on American books less frequently but printed interesting synthesizing analyses. The prevalence of reviews in the weekly magazines and the relative lack of interest in the quarterlies is evidence that the writers in question were considered appropriate for leisure reading more than serious study, on the border between popular and lasting art. Among newspapers, the Pall Mall Gazette and the Glasgow Herald were attuned to American writers, and like most newspapers, they published their reviews of popular fiction before the weeklies did, which granted them influence over the taste of working- and middle-class readers. Charges of log-rolling—when a reviewer grants positive reviews to his friends and excludes new authors—were increasingly mounted against the London weeklies into the twentieth century, which makes it especially important to look beyond these weeklies.59 Some titles were particularly attuned to some writers. The Guardian newspaper, then based in Manchester and under an editor, C.P. Scott, who was to the left of the Liberal Party, was a more reliable source of opinion about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s books and lecture tours than were any of the London-based weeklies. The Contemporary Review (1866–1988), founded as a periodical of scholarly Christianity, printed interesting reviews of the reform writings of Helen Hunt Jackson and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The Woman’s Herald (1888–1899) and Shafts (1892–1899) have been identified by Molly Youngkin as feminist periodicals that initiated a new form of liberal feminist literary criticism, and they frequently reprinted Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s poetry, but they granted attention to Freeman only once she had earned acclaim from the mainstream weeklies.60 This spread of periodicals indicates

Introduction  15 that the “American women writers” were a diverse group, not consigned to one corner of the market.

Principles of Selection and Overview The project took shape after examining digitized and print periodicals for reviews of and publicity about books by the following American authors. They are listed in the order of their year of birth: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832–1895) Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) Augusta Evans (1835–1909) Sarah Piatt (1836–1919) Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) Elizabeth Stuart Phelps [Ward] (1844–1911) Sarah Winnemucca (c. 1844–1891) Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) Kate Chopin (1850–1904) Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) Grace King (1852–1932) Gertrude Atherton (1857–1948) Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930) Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) Edith Wharton (1862–1937) Ida B. Wells [-Barnett] (1862–1931) S. Alice Callahan (1868–1894) Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934) Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) (1876–1938) Mary Antin (1881–1949) With some initial assistance from interns Adam Wood and Marie Cheetham, I conducted searches for authors’ full names, maiden names, pseudonyms, surnames only, and some of their book titles on the databases British Periodicals 1680–1930 (a database digitized by Proquest), British Newspapers (a database digitized by Gale), 19th-Century UK Periodicals (a database digitized by Gale, which includes many periodicals from the woman’s press), and British Newspaper Archive (a database digitized by Findmypast Ltd., which includes an increasing number

16  Introduction of twentieth-century titles). After identifying the most prominently reviewed authors, I searched for further materials in print periodicals and the periodicals digitized by the Modernist Journals Project. By some margin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps received the most hits in the form of substantial reviews. A strict number-crunching analysis would probably declare these three authors the most important American women exports of the era. But counting keyword hits is not sufficient. These digitized databases were created with commercial considerations in mind, and a host of contingencies shape what they include and exclude. Optical character recognition (OCR) does not pick up all references to an author given that names are misspelled in the original press coverage, scanning garbles many words, and even the digitized databases miss the odd issue of major periodicals.61 Women’s names hold particular challenges as most of these writers varied how they wished publishers to address them over the course of their lives due to marriages and divorces; the British press were generally less respectful of their wishes than were their American publishers, and hence Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, continued to be called “Mrs. Stetson” long after her marriage to Houghton Gilman. Some authors were included who did not seem to garner many reviews but are an important part of American women’s writing and its transatlantic exchange. Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not receive many formal reviews of her work, but she inspired press releases about her lectures in Britain, and she preserved her fan letters from Britain. The Indian reform writer Helen Hunt Jackson and the Native writer and activist Zitkala-Ša are featured because they received some critical attention that was telling in its absences or its slippages. Because transatlanticism is so readily associated with the international theme, and particularly with young American women seeking high culture and social respectability in the form of travel abroad and marriage to European aristocrats, I have sought out authors who wrote on other themes as well. I have also avoided authors who themselves crossed the Atlantic like a “shuttle,” in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s words, like Burnett herself, who wrote adult fiction about the Atlantic crossing, and who was claimed as a national by both Britain and the United States.62 Britons were no more exclusively metropolitan than Americans were, and many of them loved what Hamlin Garland called the “local novel,” humble tales set in rural or small-town settings, which were popular in both countries at this time. Sarah Piatt is an important poet, but as a poet, she received relatively little coverage, and her affiliation with Ireland makes an analysis of largely English reviews beside the point. Elaine Showalter identifies Gertrude Atherton as an American writer from beyond the Northeast who was lionized as the representative American during her residency in London, but reviewers faulted Atherton for the lurid sensationalism of her fiction

Introduction  17 and the creakiness of her plots.63 Stephen Lucius Gwynn writing for the Edinburgh Review apologized for devoting time to her: We have devoted so much space to Mrs. Atherton not only because she has been a success even with some educated people, but because she presents in a kind of caricature the same tendencies in American nature which other novelists indicate with less glaring colours.64 Similarly, by searching for authors’ names, this work focuses on formal critical reception of books rather than cultural allusions or influence. Media historian Stephan Pigeon found that the Ladies’ Treasury, a popular London women’s magazine, commonly reprinted fiction and nonfiction from the US press and obscured the author’s name or national origin.65 Titles were changed, items were published anonymously, or editors invented a different author’s name, and even the first paragraphs were reworked. Only a search for key phrases from the texts themselves would catch such repurposing. There are telling absences from the digitized press coverage of American women writers as well. Writers of color are treated very differently from the white, largely Northeastern women who were identified as the voice of women in the United States. Critical reaction to black women’s literary production is hard to trace. Scholars have uncovered powerful groups interested in post-emancipation black issues, including most especially the anti-lynching efforts led by Ida B. Wells- ­Barnett.66 Wells was heavily featured in widely reprinted news articles during her lecture tours to England and Scotland of the 1890s, but the periodicals did not review her publications. Some British papers were keen to reprint voices from the US South who attempted to discredit her authority over the causes of lynching.67 The targeted analysis of Vron Ware illustrates that Wells’s messages about sexism and racism were difficult to tolerate even for the most progressive of activists.68 African-­A merican fiction writers, such as Pauline Hopkins, often published their booklength work with black-owned publishing companies. Hopkins’s novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), for instance, was not reviewed in any of the usual British periodicals or newspapers, nor were Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s story collections Violets and Other Tales (1895) or The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899).69 Thus, for traces of the reception of black writing and activism, one must be tuned in to the silences in the databases. Much like black or Native American writers, southern and western white women writers were short-changed in their critical reception. Publishing house Ward, Lock, and Tyler’s Lily Series, cheap editions of books aimed at girls and women (each work cost one shilling), reprinted

18  Introduction works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Fanny Fern, and the ­Warner sisters, but not by Augusta Evans, a southern writer popular in the United States. Grace King received only a few reviews, which focused on her sympathies for the French Creole people and her appeal to French readers.70 Mary Hunter Austin’s fiction and nature writing, now associated with the local color movement, the American Southwest, and New Woman writing, received more notices that her books had arrived on periodical tables than reviews.71 Kate Chopin’s work was roundly ignored by reviewers as well, probably because she lacked the backing of a New York publisher. Her now widely anthologized “The Story of an Hour” was reprinted under the title “The Dream of an Hour” in Bow Bells in April 1895, but the only one of her books to be noticed (but not reviewed) by the British periodicals was Bayou Folk (1894), which was published by the Boston Publishing House Houghton Mifflin Company and distributed in England by their agents Gay and Bird.72 The Chicago publisher Way and Williams which published her second story collection, A Night in Acadie (1897), “consciously tested the limits of propriety” and “was located far from the Boston-New York publishing axis.”73 Neither that story collection, nor The Awakening (1899), which Way and Williams agreed to publish before ceding their assets to Herbert S. Stone and Company, received any reviews on the current databases. Mary Austin derided the too-close connection between the New York publishers and British reviewers because there was a broader diversity of writers and readers from beyond New York who shaped American sales and reviews but escaped the British understanding of American letters.74 The cases of Austin, Chopin, and King suggest that Mary Austin was right. These cases also illustrate the gap between the mere physical presence of American books in Britain and the public discourse about what that presence means for Britons. British periodicals had the power to shape that public discourse, even though individual readers likely read more variously. With these caveats in mind, this book will not provide definitive answers for why these writers received critical acclaim. Often analyses of reception, particularly “foreign” reception, make the leap rather quickly from an analysis of the material evidence to a superficial explanation that draws on national types.75 It is not simplistically the Englishness of the Spectator reviewers that makes them rail against the inconvenient Puritanism of Freeman’s characters or the Protestant evangelicals alone who enjoyed Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s theology and reform fiction. Phelps and Freeman were good writers, not just writers with backing in New York or Boston. It is impossible to attribute any of these responses predominantly to the nationality or religion of the reviewer. De gustibus non est disputandum; in matters of taste, there can be no disputes. Social psychologists have argued that people have difficulty articulating their inner states, including their preferences,

Introduction  19 even in cases where repression of trauma is not present, and this means that the reasons for the success of any one book in Britain are unlikely to be documented.76 Since these authors, as well as most professional writers of their day, were highly prolific, the chapters that follow selectively analyze the reception of particular volumes that were crucial to their debut, when the criticism was the freshest and most open-minded, or to the establishment of their reputation, or particularly relevant to ongoing critical conversations. No single study could “comprehensively” survey the reviews, for there were thousands of them, only a small portion of which have been digitized or otherwise preserved. The outlets for British reviews doubled over the decade between 1854 and 1864 (from 624 to 1,250) and continued to increase astronomically during the decades of concern.77 Reviews of books, events, or plays were granted a larger proportion of periodical space than they are granted today, far outnumbering the columns devoted to literary gossip.78 Given available archives, this study seeks to be as comprehensive as possible while maintaining readability. Chapter 1, “American Women’s Books and the British Literary Marketplace,” provides a context and explains findings that relate to the following chapters. It analyzes the review as a genre, a genre of condensation, caution, disjunction, and hyperbole. It examines press articles that treat American women writers as a group. Arguing for a reciprocal relationship between reviews and library holdings, it considers as a case study the holdings of Nottingham’s subscription and public libraries in the 1880s through the 1910s. The presence of these authors on library shelves renders tangible the processes of dissemination and canonicity. Using correspondence in the Harper archives from the mid-twentieth century, I contrast the dissenting reader—the British reviewers who were genuinely attempting to guide readers to fair-minded and cosmopolitan understandings of literature—to the delighted American author, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, who was pleased but amused by her British readership, and to her even more delighted US publisher, Harpers, who viewed foreign markets primarily for their monetary value. Chapter 2 studies the critical reception of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s popular and politically demanding fictions. The Gates Ajar won Phelps wide popular readership and critical attention, which was strong enough to carry readers to her later works, particularly Hedged In (1870) and The Silent Partner (1871). Editors and reviewers were shocked and fascinated by her feminist agitation. The chapter considers responses in spiritualist periodicals as well as feminist and conservative religious outlets. The results suggest that Phelps’s varied output about everything from heaven to manufacturing was received as one interconnected feminist corpus. Chapter 3 turns to one of the most feted and influential American women writers in Britain, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. There was an

20  Introduction “English craze” for Mary Wilkins in the early 1890s, and this chapter studies how the craze and later readings of Freeman drew on the conflicting impulses of Anglo-Saxonism and dissent, including feminist dissent. In Freeman reception, the mainstream press radically differs from the attention she received in women’s magazines such as Atalanta, Woman’s Herald, and Shafts. This chapter addresses the implications of this split for all the writers discussed in the book. Chapter 4 studies Native American writing and Indian reform writing. It reads carefully into a dearth of reception to articulate the subtle ways in which some British reviewers were receptive to the Native forms of literary writing and the causes that Native writers espoused. Native women writers received almost no notice. The thin reception of Zitkala-­Ša’s book volume largely focused on the entertainment value of her Native legends. The white Indian reform writer Helen Hunt ­Jackson’s nonfiction exposé of broken US treaties with Indians, A Century of Dishonour (1881), received notice but nothing on the scale she had hoped for from that book. Her popular novel, Ramona (1884), garnered some interesting readings of its darkly rebellious character Alessandro in the midst of the expected appreciation for its picturesque scenery. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s critical reception was more positive. Her reviewers praised her poetry and nonfiction for their humor, pungency, and scientific mindedness. Yet while the Native American writers failed to become famous in Britain, and Freeman’s fame was a product of popular book editions and the Harper Publishing House’s transatlantic business, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s fame stemmed from personal connections. Reviews are contrasted to fan letters in Chapter 5. Personal correspondence to Gilman testifies to the subjective state involved in building a wide community of like-minded people. Their expressions of affective communion compensate for the alienation that arises from physical and cultural distance. Despite Gilman’s current reputation as a feminist who cultivated discourses of white race superiority, few of her British fans seemed to share her Anglo-Saxonism. Chapter 6 discusses the enormous critical success of Wharton in Britain. From long before she published the best-selling society novel The House of Mirth (1905), British publishers and reviewers classed Wharton as a highly skilled writer of American life, with its modern moral conundrums of divorce and social climbing. They were confused by the modern form of her fictions, like the novella, or the short story with the abnormally abrupt conclusion. By the time she published The Custom of the Country (1913), many reviewers writing for the Athenaeum or the Saturday Review clearly relished the opportunity to decry American vulgarity and arrogance, but as World War I wreaked its damage on British society and the transatlantic book trade, popular newspaper reviews of Summer (1917) asserted their

Introduction  21 independence from the critical establishment and emergent modernist taste to articulate her larger corpus’s latent feminism. The Epilogue summarizes the argument and considers American women writers in Britain today. Wharton’s staying power demonstrates that American women writers collectively and individually had established multiple places in Britain.

Notes 1 Rosalys Coope and Pete Smith, Newstead Abbey A Nottinghamshire Country House: Its Owners and Architectural History 1540–1931 (Bristol: Thoroton Society, 2014), 148–9. 2 Sarah Meer argues that Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin initiated a new phase in British reviewing; after admiring that novel’s craft and sense of social purpose, they began to treat all American literatures with equanimity. Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). Meer does not consider how the culture of British reviewing in general became more even-­ tempered after 1860 (see discussion below). Susan David Bernstein summarizes the scholarship which has shown how British women writers drew inspiration from sentimental fiction and abolitionist writing when they cultivated their own notion of sympathy for subordinate others. Bernstein, however, does not consider writers of the postbellum generations featured in my book: Susan David Bernstein, “Transatlantic Sympathies and Nineteenth-­ Century Women’s Writing,” in The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature, ed. Dale M. Bauer (London: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 256–72. 3 Anne E. Boyd and Naomi Z. Sofer conceptualize the earlier generation of these writers as a transitional generation between the sentimentalists and the modernists: Anne E. Boyd, Writing for Immorality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Naomi Z. Sofer, Making the “America of Art”: Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). Somewhat in distinction to this gender-segregated sense of literary history, Elizabeth Ammons stresses that women writers of the turn of the century wanted to be considered artists, but that their writing differed radically along the lines of ethnicity in Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Charlotte Rich reads the American women writers of the turn into the twentieth century as New Woman writers, but she focuses on ethnic women writers and their departure from white feminism in Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era (St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 2009). Drawing on a wider variety of women writers, Donna Campbell shows how many women wrote within the naturalist genre in Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2016). British women writers of the same generations have been read in terms of different genres and movements like aestheticism (Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-­Victorian England [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000]) and New Womanhood (Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism [New Brunswick: Rutgers University

22  Introduction Press, 1990]). These slight differences in emphasis illustrate the difficulties of studying transatlantic women’s writing in this era, which has been less visited upon than the eras of sentimentalism or modernism. 4 C. Kegan Paul, review of The Gates Ajar, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Theological Review, October 1870, 585. George Miller Beard, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Putnam, 1881). 5 Nina Baym argues that antebellum Americans experienced the British reviewers as especially full of sharpness and candor (Novels, Readers and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America, 20, 46). Surveying British monthly periodicals for reviews of American writers, Arnella K. Turner concurs: Some critics view American literary efforts with contempt so thinly veiled that they might better have not made the effort to hide it, while others are fulsome in their praise of particular authors. There is also a good bit of condescension, as though a backward child had suddenly and inexplicably shown a glimmer of promise. Approbation of such promise is tempered frequently with expressions of wonder by the critics—­wonder that even a degree of excellence could have sprung from rough and barren American cultural soil. Turner downplays the shift that took place in the late nineteenth century and does not consider American women as a separate group. Arnella K. Turner, Victorian Criticism of American Writers: A Guide to British Criticism of American Writers in the Leading British Periodicals of the Victorian Period, 1824–1900 (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1991), 13–14. In terms of gender dynamics, Marysa Demoor stresses that the British press was largely male-dominated and maintained a male ethos of urbanity, candid integrity, and “clubbability”: Marysa Demoor, “Editors and the Nineteenth-Century Press,” in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), 95. 6 On the culture of Victorian and Edwardian reviewing, see Joanne Shattock, “The Culture of Criticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914, ed. Joanne Stattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71–90; John Woolford, “Periodicals and the Practice of Literary Criticism, 1855–64,” in The Victorian Periodicals Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 109–42; Joanne Wilkes, “Reviewing,” in Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Linda H. Peterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 236–50: Linda H. Peterson, “Writing for Periodicals,” in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-­C entury British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 77–88; Beth Palmer, “Prose,” in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), 138–51; Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Hounsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 1–35. 7 Peterson, “Writing for Periodicals.” 8 Shattock, “The Culture of Criticism,” 87. 9 Janice A. Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor,” Book Research Quarterly 2 (Fall 1986): 12; Barbara Hochman, Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 6.

Introduction  23 10 On the shortcomings of reviews in the contemporary British poetry scene, see Rory Waterman, “The Arts of Non-Criticism, or, The Sword is Mightier Than the Pen,” PN Review 41 no. 5 (2015): 10–12. Criticism of reviews grew apace among the modernists, who were increasingly alarmed in the 1920s over poor conditions for reviewers, who were forced to write increasingly quickly and couch their evaluations to ever shorter word lengths. In the 1920s, the distinction was first made between the concept of a reviewer and the concept of a critic. See Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), 26, 79–87. 11 The Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945, www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ RED/index.html. 12 On the difference between the text and the book as they are conceived by literary critics and book historians, see Meredith L. McGill, “Literary History, Book History, and Media Studies,” Turns of Event: Nineteenth-­ Century American Literary Studies in Motion, ed. Hester Blum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 23–49. 13 Mary Hammond, “Readers and Readerships,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914, ed. Joanne Shattock (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 2010), 33. 14 For applications of network theory to periodicals, see John Fagg, Matthew Petthers, and Robin Vandome, “Introduction: Networks and the Nineteenth-­ Century Periodical,” American Periodicals 23, no. 2 (2013): 93–104. 15 Paul Lauter, “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties,” in Canons and Contexts (Cary: Oxford University Press, 1991), 22–47; Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 34–65. 16 Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 119–20. 17 Annis Pratt, “The New Feminist Criticism,” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 872–8. 18 Lillian S. Robinson, “Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective,” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 883. 19 Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago Press, 1986), 168–85. 20 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 12. 21 Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) and Nina Baym in “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” in Feminism and American Literary History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 80–89 argue that canonical American fiction writers had been canonized not for their work’s inherent aesthetic value but for its ability to exemplify or interrogate such American topics as democracy, heroic individualism, or the Puritan mind. 22 Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 170. 23 Elaine Showalter, “Women and the Literary Curriculum,” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 875. 24 Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women’s Writing (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1975), 4. 25 Anne Stevenson, “Writing as a Woman,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, in association with the Oxford University Women’s Studies Committee, 1979), 160.

24  Introduction 26 Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 35. 27 The term “nationalist master-narrative” comes from Eve Tavor Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810: Migrant Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1. 28 Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, www.symbiosistransatlantic.com/news/. 29 For an analysis of the Anglo-American literary relationship as a postcolonial one, see Lawrence Buell, who has addressed the ways in which antebellum American literature bears witness to a postcolonial struggle against imperial Britain. Transatlanticism generally emphasizes that the literary relationship has been a multi-faceted one, not one solely built on a power struggle to gain national ascendancy. Lawrence Buell, “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,” American Literary History 4, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 411–42. 30 Edwin Arlington Robinson, quoted in Shirley Marchalonis, introduction to Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Shirley Marchalonis (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), 4. 31 Shari Benstock, “A Critical History,” in The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, ed. Shari Benstock (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994), 312. 32 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 204. 33 “The Profession of Literature in America,” Times, 16 August 1895, 3. 34 “From the Editor’s Room,” Irish Presbyterian, 1 February 1898, 25. 35 Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-­ American Relations, 1895–1904 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and the United States Empires, 1880– 1910,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315–53. 36 Bob Nicholson, “Transatlantic Connections,” in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 162–74. 37 Robert Frankel, Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890–1950 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). 38 Paul Giles, Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 39 Elaine Showalter, “English Fruits and Yankee Turnips: A Literary Banquet” (Plenary presented at Transatlantic Women Conference: Nineteenth-­ Century American Women Writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe, University of Oxford, July 2008). 40 Joseph Rezek, “What We Need from Transatlantic Studies,” American Literary History 26, no. 4 (2014): 792–3. 41 Laura M. Stevens, “Transatlanticism Now,” American Literary History 16, no. 1 (2004): 96. 42 Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Ithaca: Cornell, 2007); Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The assertion that the literary marketplaces merged into one is made in Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo’s article, “Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-American Feminist

Introduction  25

43

4 4 45

46

47 48 49

50 51 52

53

Press and Emerging ‘Modernities,’” in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880– 1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, ed. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 48–65. Delap’s book, however, modulates this perspective by tracing differences and competition between British and American periodicals and personages. Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, ed. Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012); Beth L. Lueck, Sirpa Salenius, and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, ed. Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2017). A similar essay collection coming mainly out of Britain, Special Relationships: Anglo-American Literary Affinities and Antagonisms 1854–1936, ed. Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), draws on different feminist traditions and stresses antagonism as well as sympathies and affinities. Stevens, “Transatlanticism Now,” 96. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, “General Introduction,” in Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I: Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6. Michele Moylan, “Materiality as Performance: The Forming of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona,” in Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 223–47. Marysa Demoor, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katharine Mansfield, 1870– 1920 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000), 129. For the idea that women writers engage in cultural nationalism, see Naomi Z. Sofer, Making the “America of Art.” The point about the normalcy of literature in English as a concept in the nineteenth century is made by Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose, 12–13. Katie McGettigan traces the appearance of American books in British fiction series of the mid-century. She concludes that British publishers constructed American identity as residing outside the American nation even as they stabilized a transnational identity both for the books and the Britons who read them. Katie McGettigan, “‘Across the Waters of This Disputed Ocean’: The Material Production of American Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Smith and Anna Barton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 129–48. Alexander Macmillan to George Macmillan, 10 August 1884, Macmillan Archives, Reel 1 Part II, Incoming Correspondence vols. i–iv, microfilm, Chadwyk-Healey Ltd. See Edith Wharton, The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930, ed. Shafquat Towheed (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007). Hans Robert Jauss, “The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding,” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (London: Routledge, 2001), 7–28. Wolfgang Iser, “Interaction between Text and Reader,” in The Book History Reader, 2nd ed. ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2006), 391.

26  Introduction 54 Michael C. Cohen, “Reading the Nineteenth Century,” American Literary History 26, no. 2 (2014): 408. 55 Karen L. Kilcup, ed. Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999). 56 For more information about these periodicals, consult John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1988); Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Demoor, ‘Editors and the Nineteenth-Century Press’; and Palmer, “Prose.” 57 Demoor, Their Fair Share. 58 This periodical is hereafter referred to as the Saturday Review, but should not be confused with the US weekly established in 1924. In general, the periodicals discussed originate in Britain unless otherwise noted. For the mid-century reputation of misogyny, see Merle Mowbray Bevington, Saturday Review, 1855–1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New York: Morningside Heights, 1941). 59 Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street, 82–87. 60 Molly Youngkin, Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). The Woman’s Herald was founded in 1888 as the Women’s Penny Paper; it became the Woman’s Herald in 1891 and the Woman’s Signal by 1896. I cite articles to the title under which they are indexed, but when discussing the magazine in general, I follow Youngkin in calling it the Woman’s Herald. For late overviews of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, see “Personal Notes,” Woman’s Herald, 26 October 1893; “Mary Wilkins at Home,” Woman’s Signal, 22 February 1894, 117–18. 61 Ian Milligan, “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010,” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 4 (2013): 540–69. 62 Sarah Wagner-McCoy, “Taming the American Shrew: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s New Woman and the Transatlantic Courtship Plot,” Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, ed. Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 266–81. 63 Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York: Vintage, 2009), 224. The Spectator’s reviews, for example, betray that weekly’s distrust of popular fiction; see review of American Wives and English Husbands, Spectator, 26 March 1898, 450–1; Review of The Californians, Spectator, 1 October 1898, 445; Review of Daughters of the Vine, Spectator, 25 March 1899, 419; Review of Rulers of Kings, Spectator, 14 May 1904, 779. 64 [Stephen Lucius Gwynn], “Novels of American Life,” review of Patience Sparhawk, by Gertrude Atherton and Pembroke, by Mary E. Wilkins, Edinburgh Review, April 1898, 407. 65 Stephan Pigeon, “‘I too Resolve to Unravel These!’” Journal of Victorian Culture Online, http://blogs.tandf.co.uk/jvc/2017/03/27/stephan-pigeoni-too-resolve-to-unravel-these/; “Steal it, Change it, Print it: Transatlantic Scissors-and-Paste Journalism in the Ladies’ Treasury, 1857–1895,” Journal of Victorian Culture 22, no. 1 (2017): 24–39. 66 Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London: Verso, 1992) 169–224; Gary Totten, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 16–32; Hannah Rose Murray,

Introduction  27

67 68 69

70 71

72 73 74 75

76

77 78

“‘To Hear the Black People’s Side of the Story’: Ida B. Wells and her Transatlantic Visit to Britain,” (Conference Presentation, British Association of American Studies Conference, Canterbury, April 2017). For a detailed look at British audiences’ interactions with American women abolitionists before the Civil War, see Stephanie J. Richmond, “Abolitionists Abroad: Women, Travel, and Abolitionist Networks,” GHI Bulletin, Bulletin Supplements 13 (2017): 111–29, www.ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/GHI_Washington/ Publications/Supplements/Supplement_13/111.pdf. “The Lynching of Negroes. The Mission of Miss Ida Wells,” Leeds Mercury, 7 June 1894, 8. Ware, Beyond the Pale, 169–224. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Anna Julia Cooper were mentioned by name in one news report, about a visiting lecturer discussing the progress of African Americans, although the name of Harper’s novel Iola Leroy was misspelled. “The Progress of Coloured People in the United States,” Leeds Mercury, 29 January 1895, 3. “Literary Gossip,” Athenaeum, 22 April 1893, 506–8; “History and Biography,” Westminster Review, January 1896, 467–70. See review of The Flock, by Mary Austin, Academy 22 December 1906, for a review that avers most tolerably well-informed people would be surprised to discover that a nonfiction book about shepherding can be interesting and well-written. The Athenaeum complained that Austin’s style was too fragmented and her diction too uneven or “highfalutin” (Review of The Flock, by Mary Austin, Athenaeum 16 February 1907), and the Bookman was similarly critical of her unconventional (perhaps modernist) style (Review of Isidro, The Bookman October 1905). Advertisement, Athenaeum, 21 July 1894, 108. Nancy A. Walker, “Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts,” in The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, ed. Nancy A. Walker (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 14. Mary Austin, “English Books and American Reviewers,” Bookman (New York), January 1922, 183–5. The essays collected in Huck Gutman, ed. As Others Read Us: International Perspectives on American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991) offer speculative but not flimsy reasons why some American authors have piqued the interest of some foreign readers in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 231–59; Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002). Wilkes, “Reviewing,” 237. Palmer, “Prose,” 146.

1 American Women’s Books in the British Literary Marketplace

This chapter considers book reviews as one node in a network of publishers, periodicals, booksellers, and libraries. It discusses the prominence of American books in appealing to the British common reader. It analyzes the review as a genre and treats the culture of transatlantic reviewing as a special case. Press articles that discuss American women writers as a group are analyzed, and the responses of American women writers including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Edith Wharton to their transatlantic fame are addressed. For these writers, accolades or sales from Britain were worth more in symbolic capital than they were in simple financial terms. The Americans were very important to the British, however. Reading Americans was often, if not always, part of a broader practice of dissent from local concerns. The holdings of Nottingham’s subscription and public libraries in the 1860s through the 1910s are examined as a case study. The book editions, reviews, summary articles, and library holdings all render tangible the processes of dissemination and canonicity underwent by American women writers in Britain during this time.

The British Common Reader and American Women’s Books It was in the nineteenth century that the common reader came to be. While in 1800, around 60 percent of British men and around 40 percent of women could sign their names, by 1914, nearly all the adult population could.1 One of the key types of literature that these new readers were reading was American literature. The absence of an international copyright agreement was only one of the factors that made American literature popular. While British parliament, publishers, and circulating libraries worked to keep prices of new books high throughout the nineteenth century, American writers were accustomed to writing for a mass audience. 2 Between 1840 and 1900, English people read more books by American authors than by all the writers of the European continent combined.3 In the 1870s, several changes came to pass that increased the availability and appeal of American literature. Population was growing,

American Women’s Books  29 and reform acts brought the vote to an increasing number of men, making the country a more democratic land. Primary schools became obligatory and fully publicly funded, starting with the Education Act of 1870.4 The price of books lowered because of technical innovations, the deflationary pressure of cheap reprints, and the ease of reading novels in their serialized form. By the late 1860s, publishers issued single-volume cheap reprints of three-decker novels less than a year after their first edition; it became the norm for such books to cost only six shillings, an affordable amount for the middle classes. In June 1894, the two largest circulating libraries, Mudie’s and W.H. Smith’s, issued an ultimatum to publishers, requiring them to charge no more than four shillings per volume for multi-volume works and waiting a year before issuing cheap editions. This ultimatum failed to protect high-priced, multi-volume books and is generally considered the death knell of the long Victorian novel.5 Publishers began to experiment with shorter novels in the 1890s, priced at six shillings at the time of first publication, which could be sold directly to readers, not through the circulating libraries. Once American copyright law made it necessary for British publishers to pay royalties to American authors in 1891, American books were already a staple of the common reader’s diet, and they did not decrease in popularity. Most of the books published by the authors featured in this volume sold for six shillings or less. For example, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s ­British breakthrough book was the Sampson Low edited one-shilling edition of The Gates Ajar (1869), while Freeman’s breakthrough was ­David ­Douglas’s one-shilling pocket editions of A Humble Romance and Other Stories (divided into two volumes costing one shilling each). Edith W ­ harton’s fictional breakthrough was the story collection The Greater Inclination (1899) issued by John Lane for six shillings. These books were cheap in comparison to the three-deckers of the mid-century, but some of them were dear in comparison to the chapbooks and pocket editions which circulated throughout the century in working-class reading circles. One recurring pattern in the British reviews of American women fiction writers is the reference to a book’s “little” nature. A glowing review of The Gates Ajar in Human Nature, a radical spiritualist magazine, referred to the novel as a “little book,” and the Athenaeum called Phelps’s The Silent Partner “[th]is little American book.”6 When Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) was published, the Academy referred to it as “the little story.”7 The term little carries with it a host of ambiguous and paradoxical associations: women’s writing was considered small in scale and diminutive in accomplishment; American writing was thin because of the country’s lack of history; the great American novel was not the country’s only fictional mode; brevity and truncation were becoming the style among fiction writers in the transition from Victorianism to modernism; these books articulate new truths that even the authors themselves must shy away from expressing forthrightly

30  American Women’s Books in a longer, more established form; both Phelps and Wharton found it difficult to find sustained time to write long novels because they were combining a woman’s life with a writing career. Not least among these associations were their books as material objects. Not only was The Gates Ajar sold at a shilling, it had only 174 pages in Sampson Low’s edition of it, and this volume as well as David Douglas’s pocket editions of Mary Wilkins’s works were physically smaller than The Greater Inclination, with the David Douglas edition containing sheets measuring a mere 5 5/16″ × 3 ¾″. The Greater Inclination was itself a duodecimo book with leaves of 7 9/16″  ×  4 7/8, a size that was classed as modern and humble in the late 1860s. In material and textual ways, then, American women’s British books were slim but full of impact. Periodicals and newspapers were also instrumental in increasing the flow of American literary writing into Britain. In the words of media historian Bob Nicholson, “Over the course of the nineteenth century, a series of social, cultural, political, economic, and technological forces gradually drew the periodical networks of Britain and America into an increasingly entangled ecosystem.”8 The practice of reprinting meant that readers in one country were continually exposed to news, literature, reviews, and literary gossip from the other country. Clarence Gohdes dates the turning of the magazine tide to the 1870s, when the editorial policies and methods of illustration used by leading American arts and public affairs magazines won them large British circulations that rivaled domestic periodicals.9 British publishers consulted the pages of American magazines for new American authors. For example, John Murray IV admired Edith Wharton’s The Touchstone (1900) when he read it in Scribner’s Magazine and wrote to Scribner’s London agent to inquire about publishing a British edition.10 Even American magazines that were not published in London were imported and sold at the same shops that specialized in American books. American women’s works were also published in British periodicals. These British periodicals were at a disadvantage in publishing Americans, however, because they generally did not pay as well as their American counterparts. Mary Wilkins did not publish any particularly striking short stories in the English Illustrated Magazine. When the Anglo-Saxon Review requested a manuscript from Wilkins in 1901, Lady Randolph Churchill was unable to offer as much as $75, which was considerably lower than Wilkins normally asked for.11 Increasingly throughout the century, Britons created periodicals that sought to draw together the entire Anglo-American world, like the Anglo-Saxon Review, the Review of Reviews, a monthly established by W.T. Stead which reprinted, excerpted, and condensed articles and literature from British and American magazines, or The Freewoman, a weekly feminist review edited by Dora Marsden which courted American readers and sought to spur friendly nationalist rivalries as part of its editorial mission.12 In this way, periodicals and newspapers were what

American Women’s Books  31 Bob Nicholson calls a “contact zone” for British and American reading publics.13 Whether in self-consciously transatlantic vehicles, in organs of the British literary establishment, or provincial newspapers catering to a local readership, British periodicals played a crucial role in promoting American literature by reviewing American books. They expressed classbased anxiety about what the burgeoning common readers should be reading, but they also conceded admiration for fiction and other books that could appeal to intellectuals and common readers alike.

The Culture of Transatlantic Reviewing “It has taken the United States longer to achieve independence of English critics than it took to free itself from old-world political and economic rule,” intoned Hamlin Garland in 1894, and similar rallying calls from writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Dean Howells are a familiar cornerstone of American literary history.14 Throughout the century, Americans identified British reviewers as particularly pungent and candid.15 Feminist scholars, too, have demonstrated that women writers have been accepted into the literary market only after sore disappointment, ruthless editing, and unnecessary condescension. Reviewers were one of the gatekeepers that prevented many professional women writers from achieving fame and canonicity.16 Like most scholars, feminist scholars mostly quote reviews when they are wrong, when they illustrate the forces the writer is up against. Some feminist scholars, however, have argued that periodical reviewers were more sympathetic toward women writers than were the academic critics who established English and American literatures as university subjects after World War  I.17 Despite this archival research, however, the scathing attacks and biting insults are remembered. Coupled with these misgivings from feminists and Americanists is the widely shared argument that reviews are not independent assessors: they parrot each other in an echo chamber of conventional wisdom; they review their friends in a cautious world of mutual back-scratching.18 The case against reviewers has been overstated. They were not only gatekeepers but gateways. Reviewers amplified and mediated the success of any American author in reaching a British audience, and they gave it meaning, both for the British audience, and the American writer and her British publisher who generally made it their business to collect and discuss press clippings. Reviewers were an important node in the network of individuals, objects, and practices that brought American authors to British readers. Surely reviews were not isolated pronouncements that can be attributed to the interior opinions of a named or anonymous individual but highly mediated forays that relied on a network of editors, publishers, booksellers, and postal workers to bring the book to

32  American Women’s Books the reviewer, determine what is permissible for the reviewer to say, and help delineate what meanings emerge for the wider periodical audience. Plenty of British reviews open with a stinging remark about the impossible state of American high culture. The Academy review of Edith Wharton’s The Greater Inclination begins, “This book of short stories comes out of America, and it is good. It is very good.”19 Reviews sought to frame a text for their readers, to orient the reader to the text’s coordinates in relation to themselves. They commented on what was most topically or characteristically American about a text, and they identified those aspects of the reading experience that they believed would most appeal to “the English reader.” In a variation on this fictitious and Anglocentric designation, the Glasgow Herald once invoked the construct of “the European reader.”20 Reviewers always referred to this reader in the singular, but perhaps the turn of phrase paradoxically reveals how little control reviewers, editors, and publishers had over what readers read or how they should be categorized. Reviews often closed with another negative remark, such as the Dundee Advertiser’s final words on The Greater Inclination, “The book has an American savour. It reveals a pretty extensive knowledge of life, and considerable literary ability, but the sentiment is too highly strung.”21 Such openings and closings bracketed remarks, though, that were careful, precise, provocative, and candid. Although literary critics often summarize a review’s content as simply “positive” or “negative,” reviews rarely added up to a coherent whole and could be withering in one sentence and glowing in another. This lack of a unified viewpoint is a result of the amateur status of reviews, the fact that they were written quickly to deadline by a reviewer who was not necessarily a specialist in the type of literature in question. Indeed, Victorian reviewers recognized their own spontaneity and liveliness and, when English and American literatures began to be taught in universities in the late nineteenth century, they resisted the overspecialization of academic criticism. 22 Often, especially before the 1890s, reviewers were heavy on plot synopsis or quotation, knowing that readers were not likely to obtain a copy of the book immediately, which meant that reviews let the authors speak for themselves. Reviewers often treated long books by new authors superficially, paying undo attention to prefaces or the opening chapters. One might assume that a key difference between a reviewer and a common reader is that a reviewer comments on the whole book, while a reader subjectively picks out selections of interest. 23 Many reviews of new volumes from abroad, however, were full of selectivity, impressionistic observations, and misreadings. These responses reveal a lot, about the book, the reviewer, and the periodical for which they are reviewing. Although by the middle of an author’s career one can sometimes predict how an established review outlet will respond to her work, the impressionistic nature of reviews meant that they are never quite that predictable. In reviews, there is no unity of argument.

American Women’s Books  33 Unlike literary criticism, reviews are synchronic rather than diachronic. Take, for example, Margaret Oliphant’s review of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar, Hedged In, and The Silent Partner, which appeared anonymously in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in October 1871.24 This review has been cited by Phelps critic Carol Kessler as a sign of Phelps’s cultural prestige, but Oliphant’s approach to both Phelps and American literature is more complex than that.25 The review was entitled “American Books” and its occasion was to review books that had recently appeared in authorized London editions, including, in this order, Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp, Bret Harte, “The Heathen Chinee,” Joaquin Miller, Songs of the Sierras, the anonymous volume The Breitmann Ballads (by Charles Leland), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar, Mrs. [A. D. T.] Whitney, Hitherto: A Story, Phelps, Hedged In, Phelps, The Silent Partner, and Miss [Louisa May] Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, Little Women, and Little Men. Although one might hope for Oliphant to prefer the women writers, she was slightly more complimentary to Harte and Miller. Oliphant opens the review with some arch commentary about the “lighter literature of America” that is a “mere imitation of the English model.” This is one of the occasions in which Oliphant adopted a persona in the beginning of her reviews in order to fit into the masculine literary establishment.26 She continues, however, to class all these books as a novel sort, full of “the impulse of new life” (422) and “chaotic heavings of untrained intellect, and power which has not quite learned to know itself and its strength,” even though they are “to be found about the bookstalls in very slim and cheap, and apparently very popular, little volumes” (423). This mixture of archness, snobbery, and fascination is entirely typical of British reviewers; Robert Weisbuch’s point that the insult and enmity between British and American writers was ultimately generative is well taken; the American writers had clearly provoked Oliphant and were likely to be remembered.27 These volumes, says Oliphant, represent two new worthy branches of American literature, the literature of the “lawless outskirts of the world” (423) and “the feminine side of American character in its newest phase” (436–6). The latter variety is “feminine in tone, but so far different from the merely domestic ideal as to open up to us a new school of thought and feeling, such as we have but few specimens of in England” (423); with this statement, Oliphant attempts to distinguish between women’s fiction that reinforces the gendered order and women’s fiction that treats middle-class domesticity as a site of ideological contradiction, thus grappling with questions of what constitutes a feminist literature still occupying feminist literary critics today. 28 Of the three Phelps volumes, Oliphant reserves the highest praise for Phelps’s The Silent Partner, an industrial novel which features an activist textile factory worker, Sip Garth, Sip’s disabled sister Catty, and the factory owner’s daughter Perley Kelso, who works with Sip to better labor conditions. Oliphant praises the novel for offering an alarming perspective on New England,

34  American Women’s Books one that treats the region not as a rural idyll but as a manufacturing district with urgent problems of labor exploitation. Present-day critic Jill Bergman argues that The Silent Partner is a programmatic rewriting for a more feminist age of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South (1855). Unlike in North and South, in The Silent Partner, the middle-class heroine unhappy about factory conditions refuses to be a silent partner in marriage or the factory. 29 While some of the British reviewers of 1871 found Phelps’s work to be derivative of various English writers, no reviewer pointed out this connection to Gaskell’s novel of 16 years earlier. This is one of the differences between review discourse and critical discourse; while criticism focuses on diachronic connections between great authors, an approach which encourages readers to find American women to be belated or indebted, reviewers focus on synchronic connections among contemporary books destined for greatness or obscurity. As a result, reviewers are comparatively inclined to articulate something interesting about a book without forcing final conclusions. The ephemeral nature of reviews makes them a welcome antidote to the convenient generalizations that can result from hasty learning about earlier periods of American literature, which are inevitably squeezed into ever fewer weeks in the university or school curriculum to make room for contemporary books. Students might well walk away from university instruction believing that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin nicely represents all of women’s domestic fiction, while Kate Chopin’s The Awakening neatly stands in for all New Woman fiction. Stephen Crane’s “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” (1893/1896) might be remembered as a simpler illustration of the techniques of American literary naturalism than Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. In contrast, the reviews demonstrate that the evolution of the novel form happened without an immediately evident sense of forward progression, and they read each new novel on its own terms, not terms laid out by a short booklist suitable for a certain number of university credits. For example, Constance Fenimore Woolson was praised in the 1880s for her dramatic plotting, a trait that distinguished her from writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, who were developing new prose forms that did not rely on incident.30 In the words of one reviewer, Woolson’s Anne (1880) holds “a place midway between the old American novel of incident and the modern American novel of analysis,” a judgment with which many contemporary critics would agree.31 Another critic declared confidently that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth failed to “attain the indescribably fine and radiant quality of the best of its author’s short stories,” a judgment with which generations of critics have disagreed.32 Similarly, reviewers’ ideas about what is most characteristic or topical about American life might cause impatience with contemporary poststructuralists about the realist faith in literature’s ability to serve as a window into a national life, and as much as reviewers of the first decade

American Women’s Books  35 of the twentieth century began to doubt literature’s ability to serve as an accurate window into reality, the reviewers’ willingness to debate what was most characteristically American demonstrates that they relied on literature to expand and complicate their knowledge of an unfamiliar country. The fact that they debated what each new book added to collective knowledge about the United States in a serial nature, week after week, month after month, or quarter after quarter, suggests that they viewed this task of knowledge gathering about national differences to be open-ended and indeterminate. They revise definitions of the national characteristics of literature weekly, and they included women writers in their ruminations, both as a group and as distinct individuals. Many of the reviews discussed in this study were written by young writers who cannot be considered the authoritative and powerful voices of an established cultural group. Given that there were so many young Americans and other Anglophone men and women of letters looking for work in London, they were not necessarily written by Britons. The Athenaeum review of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s volume, The Silent Partner (1871), was published anonymously, as was typical for that weekly in that decade, but the periodical’s marked file preserved at City University, London identifies the reviewer as Robert Collyer, who may have been an American Unitarian.33 The possibility demonstrates why it would be wrong to attribute a distinctive “Britishness” to the reviews discussed throughout this book. One of the longest and most substantial reviews of Mary Wilkins’s A Humble Romance and Other Stories  ­appeared in  a new journal, the London Bookman, in only its third issue, probably written by a more obscure author of English provincial fiction, Agnes MacDonnell. Edith Wharton’s early short story collections were reviewed by some journalists who remain obscure, like B. Rouser and James J. Guthrie. Both Freeman and Wharton were regularly reviewed in newspapers from towns like Wrexham, Wales or Belper, Derbyshire, and I have found only one occasion of plagiarizing another newspaper’s review, so these provincial reviews were original, and they were not parrots, as their reviews often appeared before reviews written by the London weeklies or monthlies.34 Nor did the British reviews parrot the American reviews, which began to appear earlier since there was usually a slightly earlier American publication date. Major literary personages encouraged the dissemination of American women’s writing as well, of course. The publisher C. Kegan Paul praised The Gates Ajar on the pages of the Theological Review, Brontë scholar and journalist W. Robertson Nicoll visited Mary E. Wilkins in her Randolph, Massachusetts home in the 1890s,35 the Scottish poet William Sharp wrote a glowing review of E. Clarence Stedman and E. ­McKay’s Library of American Literature (a ten-volume compendium whose presence on the British market signaled the viability of American literature for transatlantic audiences) that noted the fine pieces by

36  American Women’s Books Elizabeth Stoddard, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Emma Lazarus, Mary Noailles Murfree, Constance Fletcher, and Mary Wilkins.36 Sharp also wrote a glowing letter to a young Gertrude Atherton after reading her novel Hermia Suydam (1889) which heralded her as the “coming American woman.”37 The pioneering newspaper the Pall Mall Gazette under the editorship of the renowned American enthusiast W.T. Stead was one of the few papers to denounce the US mistreatment of American Indians in its review of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona. Among the American activists invited to Warwick Castle by the Countess of Warwick—Frances Evelyn Greville Warwick, often known as Daisy Warwick, who shared socialist ideas with W.T. Stead—was Charlotte Perkins Stetson.38 Many of these people were certainly part of a British cultural establishment, but they had some of the characteristics of people on the border, too, who were uniquely able to see the other without assimilating the other to the self. In theorizing the transatlantic feminist network, ­Margaret H. McFadden borrows from feminist philosopher María ­Lugones the idea that “border” people travel with extraordinary ability to know the other’s world.39 McFadden suggests that single women, lesbians, and Scandinavian women accustomed to having to operate ­beyond their mother tongues were the best positioned to know the other’s world. The list of British enthusiasts for American women writers contains men and women who dissented from the capitalist economic system, the masculine literary establishment, the gender binary and hierarchy, or religious orthodoxy. While it is beyond the scope of this book to delineate the exact mix of insiderness or outsiderness of any one of these American enthusiasts, suffice it to say that their readings of American women’s writing were bound up in different degrees with dissent.

Dissenting Readers and Delighted Writers Throughout the period appeared several calls from critics for American women writers to be treated as a group with a unique and lasting contribution to make. Some of these form a more principled dissent than others. In 1892, the nonconformist London Quarterly Review wrote that Jane Austen was more “timeless” than some deservedly admired American writers like the living writers Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Frances Hodgson Burnett. But Austen’s novels did not display the varieties in scene and theme, nor the intensity of feeling nor courage in addressing social, moral, and religious problems that these young and contemporary writers did.40 It was the newer writers, then, not the period’s favorite woman writer, who experimented with form and moved the novel into a higher emotional tenor and explicit political concerns. Like George Eliot herself, American novelists were associated with moving didacticism out of a strictly religious worldview into a secular moralism. In August 1912, the weekly feminist review the Freewoman published

American Women’s Books  37 an article proclaiming that American women writers were taking the literary world by storm. The author, Francis Grierson, wrote that American women are an arm of the women’s movement, one that has made people stand up and take notice. They bring something new not only to politics, but also to literature. While Zola brought unwelcome pessimism to literature, and male realists are materialists, the women bring a new psychic vision and emotion that never lapses into sentimentality. Grierson praises Harriet Beecher Stowe as the originator of this style of writing and identifies Mary Hunter Austin’s Lost Borders (1909) and particularly her story “The Readjustment” as this style’s most recent proponent. Francis Grierson was a composer, pianist, and literary author who was born in England but spent part of his childhood in the United States before moving back to England and embarking on a musical career that took him to courts and salons in France, England, Germany, Denmark, and Russia. He had just recently published a memoir of his family’s sojourn in the United States, The Valley of Shadows (1909), a romantic tale of abolitionist life in Illinois before the Civil War, complete with runaway slaves and the underground railroad.41 Clearly, the moral backbone exhibited by women abolitionists and women writers had a big effect on Grierson, who corresponded with Mary Austin (another Illinois expatriate) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman privately as well.42 The hybrid subject Grierson uses his pen to propose a place in Britain for American women as a group.43 One might well wonder how the American women writers discussed in this volume responded to these British views of their work. For the most part, as stated in the introduction, they were deeply flattered, believing that England represented the bastion of tradition and literary taste in contradistinction to the American market, readily associated with mass readership, which could reward an author with sales for ephemeral reasons like good advertising or a sensational response from the press. But sales in England were generally not very actively sought after. For most authors, praise from England had emotional rather than financial value. The literary market was smaller in England, and it was difficult for authors to be certain that they were receiving all the royalties promised to them before the passing of the Chase Act in 1891. For example, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps recognized the size of the B ­ ritish market for The Gates Ajar, mentioning proudly in her autobiography that the volume sold even more copies in England than it had in the United States.44 Although she assured readers that her first ­English publisher, Sampson and Low, repaid her generously, she mourned that most English publishers did not, commenting about the curious discrepancy between reports of foreign sales and receipt of earnings.45 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman similarly complained about being cheated by piratical British publishers.46 Helen Hunt Jackson expressly wished her exposé of US treatment of Native Americans, A Century of Dishonour,

38  American Women’s Books to be published in the United Kingdom because of its record in bringing Americans to account in their treatment of African Americans.47 Zitkala-Ša did not actively court British success. In her autobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman disparaged her personal ability to negotiate with publishers to work the market, but she treasured the personal acquaintances she made in England and bragged about meeting people as important as the Duchess of Sutherland and J. Ramsay MacDonald (who later became the first Labour prime minister).48 Of all these writers, Edith Wharton was the one most attuned to British acclaim in all its forms. As ­Chapter 6 addresses, it is possible that her decision to focus on long society novels rather than psychological novellas or formally experimental short stories stemmed from her desire to capture the most lucrative part of the British market. Freeman’s case was complicated. Her preface to the Edinburgh edition of A Humble Romance and Other Stories courts a British market in saying that, “I hope these studies of the serious and self-restrained New England villagers may perhaps give the people of Old England a kindly interest in them.”49 The very fact that Freeman was invited to write a preface speaks to the regard for her within the British market and her willingness to carve out a space for herself within it. But the words are polite and modest, and, perhaps, convey diffidence, because the interest of the British in her stories required being rationalized and explained. Later in her career, Freeman seemed to warm to the idea that her work was popular in Britain. In the mid-1920s, a Susan Richmond of London wrote Harpers asking for permission to adapt Freeman’s story “A Conquest of Humility” (1887) into a play for the Arts League of Service Traveling Theatre, a subsidized society, associated with George Bernard Shaw, that produced good plays for small audiences in the provinces. Harpers negotiated for a steep royalty rate out of the Arts League. William H. Briggs of Harpers New York office appealed to Cass Canfield, then of Harpers’ London office, for advice, implying that Britain was very far away and he could not possibly estimate the amount of royalty that should be asked for, given the unfamiliarity of the whole situation: “It is hard to estimate at this distance just what commercial value the play will have.”50 The remark illustrates that even for these writers’ publishers, the Atlantic seemed very large and England very far away. As per normal publisher agreements, Freeman read the adaptation and granted Susan Richmond permission to adapt the play for an agreed upon royalty. Freeman’s correspondence with Harpers sounds bemused: “I see nothing wrong with it except of course the dialogue is impossible in New England.”51 In April 1926, Freeman planned to give a speech that sounded defensive toward foreign critics. The speech was penned for the occasion of

American Women’s Books  39 receiving the Howells Gold Medal, although it was never delivered as she failed to summon the courage on the day: Alluding to Mr. Garland and his mention of “Local Color” I wish to say something in defense of him of myself and of many American writers who are criticised by men of other nations for making too much use of it, for placing too much stress upon back grounds of limited areas. I wonder what else is possible.52 But privately in December 1928, she wrote to Miss Edith O’Dell, the editor of Golden Book, that she appreciated foreign praise. O’Dell’s suggestion that she should send her occult stories to England seemed a good one. In the United States, Freeman believed, the War had “knocked all values into chaos,” but in England, her stories still seemed popular: “I like the plan of writing for England. I have understood they regard me very kindly over there.”53

American Women’s Books in Nottingham Libraries The presence of American literature in library catalogues indicates the debates and struggles that ensued over whether American books were deserving of canonicity. During the nineteenth century, new spaces for reading outside the home developed, including church libraries, artisan libraries, mechanics’ institutes, miners’ institutes, subscription libraries, reading clubs, and reading societies.54 Free town (public) libraries developed from 1850 onward, after legislation was passed amidst debates over whether property owners should be asked to pay for the education of the working classes via their property taxes (which were known as “the rates”). Whereas circulating libraries catered to people’s need for entertainment, public libraries strove to prepare people for participation in civil society and technical workplaces. Public libraries were established to raise the tone of the public, then, not lower the tone of rational-­ critical debate or aesthetic appreciation. It was against this backdrop that we can understand the vexation of librarians in what they came to call the Great Fiction Debate of the 1880s and 1890s, when they argued in library committees and professional meetings about the amount of money that libraries were spending on popular fiction—a significant portion of this fiction being of American origins. Extent catalogues of the libraries in the city of Nottingham illustrate the ways in which American women’s writing, like all American literature, straddled the border between elite and popular taste. A city of 76,000 in the 1861 census, known for its hosiery and lace manufacturing, Nottingham serves as a good representative of a manufacturing

40  American Women’s Books city.55 Nottingham’s first public library opened in 1868 with an initial 10,000 volumes taken from an Artizan’s Library.56 When the Nottingham Free Library opened, any residents could join so long as a rate payer vouched for them and agreed to pay fines if necessary.57 Judging from an 1868 catalogue, American literature was well represented. The Free Library subscribed to a monthly magazine called the Atlantic Review; this might have been the Boston arts and letters magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. There were several works published by the American Tract Society and several books about the United States or the continent. American literary works included Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Clarence, Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Frederick Douglass’s A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, John Greenleaf Whittier’s Poetical Works, Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, 11 titles from the range of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s works, seven titles by Susan Warner (listed under Miss. E. Wetherell), 26 titles by James Fenimore Cooper, seven by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and 17 by Washington Irving. There were gaps, to be sure, with Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, and Herman Melville missing, but this was a large collection. The Free Library’s 1881 catalogue demonstrates a steady acquisition of further works by Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna B. and Susan Warner (now listed under their real names, with pseudonyms following), and Fanny Fern, as well as eight Bret Harte titles, nine Phelps titles including some of her works for young people as well as The Gates Ajar, The Silent Partner, and The Story of Avis, and seven Henry James titles. Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century was no longer listed, nor did any titles by Harriet Jacobs, Whitman, Melville, Henry David Thoreau, or Helen Hunt Jackson appear. 58 The 1910 Catalogue of Novels, Tales, and Romances of the City of Nottingham Central Lending Library indicates that American literature had prevailed in the Great Fiction Debate. The catalogue boasts that Several hundred volumes of unnecessary duplicates, dirty copies of books which were not able to be replaced by clean copies, or books which have ceased to interest the present generation, have been withdrawn to make way on the shelves and in the Indicator for newer and more popular works of a recreative character.59 Indeed, Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular woman’s novel Mercy Philbrick’s Choice has appeared, the Alcott titles are still strongly represented, and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories, Strangers and Wayfarers, and The Tory Lover are listed, as are 22 of Mary

American Women’s Books  41 Wilkins’s works (listed under her maiden name, with her married name, Mrs. C. M. Freeman, in parentheses); A Far-Away Melody is listed (a title that only appeared in David Douglas’s cheap pocket edition, not designed for the quality library shelf), 22 of Phelps’s works (listed under her maiden name, with her married name, Mrs. E.S. Ward, in parentheses), 22 Gertrude Atherton titles, nine Edith Wharton titles, 41 Bret Harte titles, and Mary Austin’s Lost Borders: the People of the Desert. There is a notable lack of the male literary naturalists and no Kate Chopin. Compared to the public library, the Nottingham Subscription Library’s collection of American books was more selective and even more shy of tawdry or subversive titles. The Subscription Library was established in 1816 with education and classic knowledge in its mission. The 1864 catalogue lists a compilation of American humor by the Canadian Thomas Chandler Haliburton and a book about the traditions of North American Indians. Three poetry titles by Longfellow appear, but none by Whitman. The fiction titles are dominated by Cooper, and they include three Hawthorne novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dred, The Minister’s Wooing, The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Fern Leaves (no author listed), Herman Melville’s Redburn, and Susan Warner’s A Wide, Wide World. The 1881 catalogue demonstrates that the library was slow to buy much American fiction and fiction of light entertainment was limited to that written by the best-known authors. Yet during the 1880s and 1890s, the library purchased subscriptions of the Atlantic Monthly, the Century, Harper’s Monthly, Scribner’s, so these writers’ serialized fictions were available.60 The absence of clear records between 1881 and 1901 makes it difficult to know which Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins titles were purchased at the time of first publication, but stock lists from the 1910s through the 1940s suggest that these authors’ works generally appeared on the library shelves and were preserved there well past the 1930s. The Annual Reports from 1901 to 1916 illustrate that the library deigned it fit to purchase titles by W.D. Howells, Gertrude Atherton, Henry James, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins, and Owen Wister in the year of publication, as well as a rare naturalist novel (Frank Norris’s The Octopus), and an anthology, the E.C. Stedman, edited, An American Anthology 1787–1900.61 At the turn of the century, the library borrowed “cheap” fiction from circulating libraries for the purposes of short-term circulation, and more American titles might have been available in the library through this route; the register of borrowed books included titles by such currently respected authors as Mark Twain, Edith Wharton (her titles from the 1920s), Jack London, May Sinclair, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, Willa Cather, and ­William Faulkner.62

42  American Women’s Books Book Committee minutes in the first decade of the twentieth century indicate plenty of anxiety on the part of librarians that a payment to circulating libraries would cede control and invite books of “low moral tone,” but the practice of using the circulating libraries continued to meet demand for popular contemporary fiction.63 In 1901, the Book Committee began a policy of comparing library holdings to “some good bibliography of standard authors.” Authors prioritized over the next decade included such British classics as Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, Walter Besant, and the Brontë sisters, yet librarians also took special care to maintain a complete collection of American authors Washington Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1913, four Thoreau titles were purchased, and in 1914, seven older Jewett titles were purchased as well.64 The Subscription Library holdings render palpable how important American fiction was to British readers, but how deeply it was considered a recreative fare.

Conclusion The nineteenth-century British literary marketplace featured American women writers as a group rather prominently, through cheap and expensive book editions and series, through favorable reviews, through summarizing pieces in the press, and through ample space on library shelves in public and subscription libraries. Male American authors were not favored during this period. In fact, American women’s writing had a long shelf life, both in the libraries and in the periodicals. It is well established that when the study of American writing moved into the universities after World War I, sentimentality and regionalism began to be shunned and certain writers ceased to be considered canonical.65 This process was exacerbated during the 1930s, when writers like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather were not favored by the turn toward issues of social class and radical politics.66 These developments did not stop the subscription libraries from continuing to stock Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman during the early twentieth century in Britain, however. It seems that the gradual turn toward muscularity that occurred in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s happened less dramatically in Britain. Even in the early twentieth century, American women’s writing was readily available and eagerly sought after in Britain.

Notes 1 Stephen Colclough and David Vincent, “Reading,” in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. VI 1830–1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 286. 2 Clarence Gohdes, American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1944), 14–46; Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading

American Women’s Books  43 Public, 1800–1900, 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 300; John Barnes, Bill Bell, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Wallace Kirsop, and ­Michael Winship, “A Place in the World,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. VI, 1830–1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 595–634. In July 1891, the first American law providing for international copyright (the Chase Act) went into effect. The law provided more protection for American writers hoping to secure royalties from their British sales than for British writers hoping to secure royalties from their American sales, however. The Chase Act insisted that the manufacture and first publication of a work had to take place in the United States. For any British publishers, this was a challenge that required significant levels of cooperation with publishers in the United States. The situation for periodical serialization in two countries at once was even more difficult, where publication of the American number would have to be on the same day, or before, that of its British equivalent. The 1911 Copyright Act in the United Kingdom, which was reciprocated by the Americans, smoothed the means of joint publication in both countries. Shafquat Towheed, introduction to The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930, by Edith Wharton (Basingstoke, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 11–12. 3 Gohdes, American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, 46. 4 The Education Act of 1870 is often treated as a watershed by book historians, but the initial act affected only England and Wales. Similar legislation came in for Scotland slightly later, partially because Scottish law had already made more provision for the public funding and overseeing of primary school education. Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History 1750–1997 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), 357–61; Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain 1851–75 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 149–70. 5 Simon Eliot, “Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Age and After,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. III, 1850– 2000, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 135–9. Eliot argues that the influence of Mudie’s over the length of novels can be disputed, given that many of its volumes were not fiction, and single-volume works of fiction were a significant presence in the company’s catalogue from the beginning. 6 Review of The Gates Ajar, Human Nature, 1 October 1870, 464; “Novels of the Week,” review of The Silent Partner, Athenaeum, 1 April 1871, 399. 7 Review of Ethan Frome, Academy, 2 December 1911, 700–1. 8 Bob Nicholson, “Transatlantic Connections,” in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 164. 9 Gohdes, American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, 65–66. 10 Anna Girling, “The Touch of a Vanished Hand: Edith Wharton’s Fraught Relationship with John Murray,” Times Literary Supplement (26 June 2015), 13. 11 Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman] to Florence E. Bate, 19 December 1901, in The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ed. Brent L. Kendrick (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1985), 255–6. 12 Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 85–94. 13 Nicholson, “Transatlantic Connections.”

44  American Women’s Books 14 Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894), 60. 15 Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 46. 16 Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin’s Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) is a classic study of how once the novel became a prestigious genre, men of letters of the 1880s and 1890s succeeded edging out the popular Victorian woman novelist. Some of their findings are disputed by Shafquat Towheed (introduction, 20–24), and Marysa Demoor argues that conditions for professional women writers and reviewers had improved considerably by the 1870s and that some magazines (like the Athenaeum) offered more scope for women contributors than previous scholarship has accounted for. Marysa Demoor, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katharine Mansfield, 1870–1920 ­(Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000). Given that the obstacles for women in publishing are well-known, feminist researchers like Demoor and Molly Youngkin in Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007) have been more inclined to search for successful female negotiations with writing for periodicals. 17 Nina Baym’s Novels, Readers, and Reviewers overturns many reigning critical assumptions about reviewers and female novelists. She argues that reviewers read woman’s fiction sensitively and with more perceptiveness than did many academic critics of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. 18 In the 1920s, authors and other reviewers complained about log-rolling, when reviewers granted positive reviews to their friends, and a star system of reviewing, when a small number of signed reviewers held too much power over the marketplace. Virginia Woolf debated whether reviewers should be subjected to the stringencies of a professional membership and posited many imaginative alternatives to the culture of reviewing in which reviewers maintained a constructive and private dialogue with authors; see Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), 79–95. 19 Review of The Greater Inclination, by Edith Wharton, Academy, July 8, 1899, 40, reprinted in Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. James W. Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21–22. 20 “New Novels,” review of The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton, Glasgow Herald, 13 November 1913, 10. 21 “Fiction,” review of The Greater Inclination, by Edith Wharton, Dundee Advertiser, 22 June 1899, 2. 22 Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 18, 25. 23 Reception studies scholars certainly argue that most common readers read selectively and recontextualize and repurpose rather than follow a prescribed path. See Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 5–6; Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47–49. 24 [Margaret Oliphant,] “American Books,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1871: 422–42. Further references will be cited in the text. 25 Carol Kessler, “The Heavenly Utopia of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,” in Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, ed. Marleen Barr and Nicholas D. Smith (New York: University Press of America, 1983), 95.

American Women’s Books  45 26 Joanne Wilkes, Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 2010), 119. 27 Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 12. 28 For example, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse rightly argue that American women regionalists depict home as a site of ideological contradiction in Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 13–16, but this characterization of regionalists’ treatment of domesticity has been open to debate. 29 Jill Bergman, “‘A Silent Partner Long Enough’: Phelps Rewrites Gaskell’s North and South,” Studies in American Fiction 33, no. 2 (Autumn 2005): 147–64. 30 Review of Jupiter Lights, by Constance Fenimore Woolson, Saturday Review, 22 February 1890, 235. 31 William Wallace, “New Novels,” review of Anne, by Constance Fenimore Woolson, Academy, 21 July 1883, 41–43. 32 Olivia Howard Dunbar, “A Group of Novels,” Critic, December 1905, 509–10, reprinted in Tuttleton, Lauer, and Murray, ed., Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, 121. 33 Micheline Beaulieu, City University, The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers 1830 –1870, http://smcse.city.ac.uk/doc/cisr/web/athenaeum/­ reviews/home.html. 34 The review of Edith Wharton’s novel The Reef in the 25 January 1913, Bury Free Press, 3 is very similar in wording to the review of the same novel in the 10 December 1912 Exeter and Plymouth Gazette. 35 Kendrick, ed. The Infant Sphinx, 123. 36 C. Kegan Paul, review of The Gates Ajar, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Theological Review, October 1870, 584–6; Kendrick, ed., The Infant Sphinx, 123; William Sharp, “American Literature,” review of Library of American Literature, by E.C. Stedman and E. McKay Hutchinson, National Review, March 1891, 56–71. 37 Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932), 166. 38 Margaret Blunden, The Countess of Warwick (London: Cassell, 1967), 132. 39 Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 150–1. 40 “Art II—Jane Austen,” London Quarterly Review, January 1892, 226–40. 41 Francis Grierson, The Valley of Shadows: Sangamon Sketches (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 42 On Grierson’s correspondence with Mary Austin, see Robert Bray, introduction to The Valley of Shadows, xxiii. On Grierson’s correspondence with Gilman, see Francis Grierson to Gilman, September 16 no year, Charlotte Perkins Gilman papers, Schlesinger Library, Collection 177, folder 150. His letter to Gilman is even more candid about Grierson’s fears for literary London of the moment. He agrees with some of her (unidentified) remarks about Kipling, writing that people in London have long known the limitations of his base and materialist realism. If we are not to be saved by the psychic vision of women, Grierson wrote, then we are bound for social chaos and that too very soon.

46  American Women’s Books 43 Another writer, from Australia, wrote in the Contemporary Review that American women writers “are neither themselves great in literature, nor are they the cause of greatness in others” (523). This is puzzling, because of all countries, the United States “seems to offer the widest field for the expansion of feminine capacity” because it has the vigor and elasticity of youth and the wisdom and experience of old age, its children are cradled in freedom, and the crudeness of its social organization is a spur to innovation (522). Yet while Mary E. Wilkins writes delightful sketches, she writes disastrous three-volume novels, and Mary Noialles Murfree’s stories are loaded by too much analysis; only Margaret Fuller has accomplished world-class quality. Although the assessment of contemporary writers was slight, the impetus for writing was the desire to see American women writers become great as a group because of the writer’s admiration for their nation. C. De Thierry, “American Women, from a Colonial Point of View,” Contemporary Review, October 1896, 516–28. 4 4 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), 111. 45 Phelps, Chapters from a Life, 112. 46 Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman] to David Douglas, May 17, 1893. David Douglas Scrapbook. National Library of Scotland. Manuscript. Acc. 12309. 47 M.C. “Mrs. Jackson,” Athenaeum, August 29, 1995, 271. 48 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 141, 211. 49 Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman], A Humble Romance and Other Stories (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890), v. 50 William H. Briggs to Cass Canfield, 5 February 1925, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman folder, Harper Brothers Series I Box 5, Columbia University. 51 Freeman to William H. Briggs, 28 January 1925, Harper and Brothers Records, Series I Box 5. This letter is reprinted in Kendrick, ed. The Infant Sphinx, 392–3. Other letters in Series I Box 5 also refer to this transaction. 52 American Academy of Arts and Letters Freeman file, Folder 3. For a more detailed reading of the power struggles within the American Academy over the decision to award Freeman the Howells Gold Medal, see Keith Newlin, “Unwitting Provocateur: Mary Wilkins Freeman and the American Academy of Arts and Letters,” Resources for American Literary Study 32 (2009): 141–61. 53 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman to Edith O’Dell Black, 16 December 1928, in The Infant Sphinx, ed. Kendrick, 428. 54 Colclough and Vincent, “Reading,” 305. 55 Colclough and Vincent, “Reading,” 285. 56 Edward Edwards, Free Town Libraries, Their Formation, Management, and History, in Britain, France, Germany, and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1869] 2010), 192. This particular Artizans’ Library was one of many libraries catering to the working classes in Nottingham, which included libraries run by nonconformist (mainly Methodist) congregations. The Artizans’ Library had been established by philanthropists, and it exerted too much social control to please working-class readers. Peter Hoare, “The Operatives’ Libraries of Nottingham: A Radical Community’s Own Initiative,” Library History 19 (November 2003), 174. 57 Nottingham Free Library, Index-Catalogue, 1868. Bromley House Library, Nottingham. 58 Nottingham Free Public Lending Library, Catalogue (1881). Bromley House Library, Nottingham.

American Women’s Books  47 59 City of Nottingham Central Lending Library, Catalogue of Novels, Tales, and Romances (1910). Bromley House Library, Nottingham. 60 Nottingham Subscription Library Book Committee Minute Book, 1904– 1910, 1 November 1905, Bromley House Library; Nottingham Subscription Library. Annual Reports 1900–1915 (missing 1912), Bromley House Library, Nottingham. 61 Nottingham Subscription Library. Annual Reports 1900 to 1915 (missing 1912), Bromley House Library; Library Committee Minutes 5 November 1901, 3 March 1903, and 16 May 1903. 62 Nottingham Subscription Library, Bromley House. H Register: Books Hired from Circulating Libraries 1900–1946. Bromley House Library, Nottingham. 63 Nottingham Subscription Library, Bromley House. Book Committee Minute Book 1904–1910 (Minutes, 28 July 1908). Bromley House Library, Notttingham. 64 Nottingham Subscription Library, Bromley House, Book Committee Minute Book 1910+, Bromley House Library, Nottingham. 65 Lauter, “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon,” 22; Fetterley and Pryse, Writing Out of Place, 28–29, 42–55. 66 Helen Killoran, The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton (Rochester: Camden House, 2001), 3; Lynn Bennett, “Presence and Professionalism: The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton,” in Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture, ed. Gary Totten (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 29–30; Sharon O’Brien, “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather,” American Quarterly 40, no. 1 (March 1988): 110–26.

2 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold in Britain

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s popular religious novel The Gates Ajar celebrates the power of the individual to console oneself after a bereavement. When the young protagonist Mary Cabot hears that her brother Roy, her only surviving family member, was shot dead on the battlefield in the American Civil War, she grows wild with grief. Her friends, neighbors, deacon, and minister offer only paltry comfort. In contrast, Mary’s aunt, Winifred Forceythe, who serves as Mary’s confidante and guru, encourages Mary to believe that heaven might be a place where people maintain their individuality and memories, where she might meet Roy someday, and where Roy might be thinking about her until she arrives. Through long talks with Aunt Winifred and copious writing in her journal, Mary learns to feel better about her brother’s death and to reach out to the community.1 The Gates Ajar was popular among a wide circle of readers in the United States, the Continent, and the English-speaking world, and it established Phelps’s reputation throughout this world as a writer of talent and vision. 2 In her 1896 autobiography, Phelps writes that she was told the novel sold nearly 100,000 copies in the United States and more than the same in Britain. 3 Phelps’s American figure seems somewhat high, but the evidence that exists for the British sales makes her figure seem plausible: Phelps’s American publisher reported that the book sold more than 83,000 copies by 1899; one of the British publishers, George Routledge and Company, put its own copies of the novel at 56,000 by 1876 with a further 5,000 produced between 1892 and 1902; and another British publisher, James M’Geachy, sold 30,000 by October 1870.4 Phelps knew of translations into French, Italian, German, and Dutch, and she received more requests for translations from Germany than from any other country. 5 Yet to date, with the exception of Lucy Frank’s analysis of the novel as a global commodity, no scholars have studied what Phelps meant to foreign readers.6 To be sure, scholars think of Phelps in transatlantic terms, but as an author who read British women and adapted their experiments with female and feminist consciousness in her own writing.7 This chapter seeks to redress the balance. On the basis of my study of

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  49 book editions, reviews, and published responses to The Gates Ajar, I argue that Phelps had a robust and admiring audience in Britain. Writing to George Eliot, Phelps called herself an “American” and an “agitator,” and indeed, this American agitator shocked and fascinated many British readers.8 Her audience was spawned by the runaway critical and popular success of The Gates Ajar, but it was strong enough to carry readers to her later, more politically demanding works, particularly Hedged In and The Silent Partner. Phelps’s work comes out of two-way transatlantic exchange around pietistic literature, spiritualism, and social reform. Yet despite that clear transatlantic influence, key to the British response was the idea that these works were quintessentially American in their startling combination of maternal preciousness and feminist rebellion. Fanciful ideas about the US nation and vulgarity and freedom informed this example of transatlantic exchange.

Phelps’s British Debut The history of the reprintings of this novel offers further evidence for Jessica DeSpain’s contention that British religious authorities were disdainful of and anxious about American religious practice, but the reviews indicate that this anxiety was not widely shared.9 The Gates Ajar burst upon the scene in Britain in June 1869, when Sampson Low, a publisher that produced authorized editions for many American books, published an authorized London edition. Fields, Osgood, and Company published the book in the United States in November 1868. Fields, Osgood did not predict the book’s success, so it did not arrange simultaneous British publication, a practice that was designed to secure some degree of copyright protection in the days before international copyright. Nevertheless, the Sampson Low edition was arranged with the blessings of the publisher and the author. This edition was cheap at an advertised price of one shilling.10 It was edited and annotated by the anonymous author of Alwyn Morton: His School and Schoolfellows: A Tale of St. Nicholas Grammar School, a book which was published by Sampson Low in 1867 that was, according to a review in the Ladies’ Own Paper, designed to “transform the school-boy into the true Christian gentleman.”11 The editor justified his decision to edit the book by saying that he “thought it better to omit some passages in which the Authoress had given perhaps too much play to her imagination.”12 Throughout the history of reprintings of The Gates Ajar, as we shall see, many editors sought to de-radicalize Phelps’s individualist evangelicalism. In her autobiography, Phelps speaks highly of Sampson Low, but she does not mention the emendations or annotations. Few letters between Phelps and her publishers exist from this early period in her career, and none that do discuss the process of vetting a British publisher.13 For the most part, Phelps writes as if Britain were very far away, misspelling

50  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold Sampson Low’s name, and leaving negotiations with British publishers to her American publisher.14 By 1883, when arranging for the British publication of Beyond the Gates (1883), Phelps eagerly asked her publisher to ensure that the novel gains a “foothold” in Britain, hoping to cash in on the British success of the first Gates novel.15 Despite this belated interest in British editions, Phelps dismissed translations of her work as mere “foreign curiosities.”16 The absence of archival evidence makes it difficult to know Phelps’s true feelings about her British audience or how much knowledge she had of Sampson Low or other publishers’ machinations. To be sure, Phelps was profoundly concerned about reaching out to particular British readers, as she sent George Eliot a copy of The Story of Avis and some of her other books.17 Jennifer Cognard-Black’s work on Phelps’s transatlantic connections demonstrates that Phelps envisioned herself as operating in a women’s transatlantic network that overrode national distinctions.18 To be sure, such a woman’s transatlantic network existed, as demonstrated by the reviews by Margaret Oliphant and an anonymous reviewer of the Englishwoman’s Review. The question is whether Phelps was aware of or in control over the way her work was being presented to the average British reader. Reprint publishers quickly issued their own editions. First was James M’Geachy of Glasgow, who collaborated with James Burns and J. Spiers of London, on a cheap edition in November 1869.19 Spotting a publishing opportunity, they boasted that this edition was unabridged, declaring, In this edition the original work is given entire, and the Publisher would say to those who consider the author has allowed her fancy to run wild, that what are deemed the wild fancies of to-day may, twenty years hence, be generally accepted as sober realities. 20 Although it was unusual for newspapers to review unauthorized editions, the Glasgow Herald silently endorsed the James M’Geachy edition by reviewing it, and it will become clear that the James M’Geachy edition served as a sort of litmus test for radical readers. 21 Next, the novel was serialized in the girls’ magazine, the Young ­Englishwoman—a volume of pure literature, new fashions, and needlework designs—from January to September 1870, alongside a poem by Gerald Massey, a poet who dabbled in spiritualism. Retailing at six pence per monthly issue, as expensive as the highbrow Saturday Review, the magazine also published contents that were firmly middle-class in outlook. George Routledge and Company followed with an illustrated book edition in April 1870, which it advertised as “unabridged,” and Ward, Lock, and Tyler, then publishers of the magazine the Young Englishwoman, deposited their own unabridged edition in the British Museum in July 1870. The English Catalogue lists an 1870 edition by Hamilton, an 1871 edition by Milner (which, as I will discuss, was heavily

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  51 annotated), and an 1890 edition by Hutchinson.22 A heavily edited and abridged version of the novel appeared as late as 1917 by W.P. Nimmo, Hay, and Mitchell, an Edinburgh publisher. Phelps’s seeming lack of attention to the way her work was being packaged and therefore read in Britain brings to mind a major question in transatlantic studies today, the question of whether the Anglo-American literary market was divided along national lines. The following material demonstrates that critics and publishers were intent on repackaging The Gates Ajar for their own, often nationalistic ends. Their attempts to repackage and reframe the novel are interesting to literary historians for two reasons. First, they demonstrate that the British domesticated their reading of American literature, linking it to local and topical concerns. Second, they reveal lines of cleavage within the British reading public, lines of conservative and radical dissent from a status quo.

The Gates Ajar, That Vulgar American Novel The conservative Protestant response was prolific and multi-faceted. As David S. Reynolds argues, the kind of non-sectarian pietistic literature of which Gates is a prominent example was common in the United States but rare in England.23 This response begins with the Sampson Low edition, which sought to iron out the novel’s maternalism, humor, and female authority. The editor’s emendations begin with a change in the epigraph. The original epigraph was by Madame de Gasparin, a Swiss, Protestant, moralist writer commonly read in translation in the United States: “Splendor! Immensity! Eternity! Grand words! Great things! A little definite happiness would be more to the purpose.”24 This epigraph is forthright and emphatic, even irate. Sampson Low replaced Gasparin with a quiet lyric from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam, A.H.H.” (1850): I shall know him when we meet: And we shall sit at endless feast, Enjoying each the other’s good: What vaster dream can hit the mood Of Love on earth? The lines are still about happiness, and they reference Tennyson’s hope that his friend Arthur Henry Hallam will retain his individual personality in the afterlife. While relevant, the Tennyson epigraph lacks the exclamatory nature of the original one, and it is no longer by a woman. Sampson Low’s most serious cut is a passage at the beginning of chapter 12 in which Phelps equivocates about whether Aunt Winifred is a Swedenborgian. Gail K. Smith writes that careful disclaimers of Swedenborgian excess were routine in books and sermons about heaven. 25 The passage deals with a sewing circle, Deacon Quirk’s panicked visit

52  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold to inquire about Aunt Winifred’s religious beliefs, and Aunt Winifred’s discussion with Mary afterward. In the sewing circle, Aunt Winifred relates some of her ideas about heaven. Mrs. Bland, the wife of the minister, says she hopes there will be many babies in heaven. Aunt Winifred replies that Swedenborg says that babies in heaven will be cared for by women especially fond of babies. After the sewing circle, Deacon Quirk visits Aunt Winifred to ask if she is a Swedenborgian. She replies no, saying that she thought she was a Swedenborgian until she read his books. But after Deacon Quirk leaves, Aunt Winifred returns to Swedenborg, quoting a long passage from his book Heaven and Hell about the beauty of heavenly homes. Phelps devised the passage so that she could have her cake and eat it too: it disavows the link between Swedenborg and Aunt Winifred for the benefit of conservative Protestants, but it draws from Swedenborg to offer a sensuous, tangible, and pleasurable vision of heaven, as well as a feminist one, in which childcare gravitates toward only those women who desire it. Sampson Low also omitted moments of flippancy and humor from the pivotal chapter 6, in which Mary reports on Dr. Bland’s dreary sermon about heaven. First, in one excised passage, Mary summarizes his sermon in an irreverent way: There was something about adoration, and the harpers harping with their harps, and the sea of glass, and crying, Worthy the Lamb! and a great deal more that bewildered and disheartened me so that I could scarcely listen to it. I do not doubt that we shall glorify God primarily and happily, but can we not do it in some other way than by harping and praying? (41) This passage mocks Dr. Bland’s sermon by dumbing it down. Second, Aunt Winifred’s crucial conjectures about humor in heaven are radically cut. Sampson Low cut this passage: “Yes, I believe we shall talk and laugh and joke and play—” “Laugh and joke in heaven?” “Why not?” “But it seems so—so—why, so wicked and irreverent and all that, you know.” (47) Later in the same conversation, Sampson Low cut “Is he going to check all the sparkle and blossom of life when he takes us to himself? I don’t believe any such thing. “There were both sense and Christianity in what somebody wrote on the death of a humorous poet:—

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  53 ‘Does nobody laugh there, where he has gone,— This man of the smile and the jest?’” (47–48) The final lines of the chapter, which finish the discussion of humor by making an American reference to the recently murdered Abraham Lincoln, are cut: How pleasant—how pleasant this is! I never supposed before that God would let any one laugh in heaven. I wonder if Roy has seen the President. Aunt Winifred says she does not doubt it. She thinks that all the soldiers must have crowded up to meet him, and “O,” she says “what a sight to see!” (48) Without these passages, chapter 6 loses sensuousness, humor, and punch. From its own day until the present, the novel is famous for assuring readers that their beloved consumer objects will be available to them in heaven. 26 Perhaps the most infamous reference to such a material object is Clotildy Bentley’s longing for a piano in heaven. This passage remains in the Sampson Low edition unchanged. But a long passage about ginger snaps and blocks in heaven is omitted. In the ginger snap passage, Aunt Winifred’s daughter Faith tells the minister’s daughter Molly Bland about her beliefs: “Yes, to be sure. I’m going to have some little pink blocks made out of it when I go; pink and yellow and green and purple and—O, so many blocks! I’m going to have a little red cloud to sail round in, like that one up over the house, too, I shouldn’t wonder.” Molly opened her eyes. “O, I don’t believe it!” “You don’t know much!” said Miss Faith, superbly. “I shouldn’t s’pose you would believe it. P’r’aps I’ll have some strawberries too, and some ginger-snaps,—I’m not going to have any old bread and butter up there,—O, and some little gold apples, and a lot of playthings; nicer playthings—why, nicer than they have in the shops in Boston, Molly Bland! God’s keeping ‘em up there a [sic] purpose.” (103) The passage details consumer longing for “nicer playthings,” making heaven the best of a shopper’s paradise, but then again, it is spoken in the voice of a three-year-old. The editor might have cut it out not because of its shocking references to shopping but because of its cuteness. Faith, more than consumer objects, proved one of the most controversial aspects of the novel. It is as if Sampson Low wanted to suppress

54  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold a rebel child. British reviews of Louisa May Alcott’s work and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Concerning Children similarly faulted these other Americans for allowing children to trust their moral compass and revel in “precocious freedom.”27 Sampson Low excised many passages about Faith’s childish antics. One can conclude that Sampson Low felt that childish antics held no place in pietistic literature. Like the Sampson Low edition, the Milner edition sought to dampen certain shocking elements. This publisher of poetry and miscellaneous works printed the complete text, without any of Sampson Low’s annotations or cuts, although it borrowed the Tennyson epigraph. A series of footnotes broadcasts the editor’s opinions on everything from the antics of children to debates among theologians. The blunt statements Mary makes early in the novel about her religious doubt, when her grief is most lacerating, are heavily footnoted in chastening, pompous language. When Mary writes, “Death and heaven could not seem very different to a Pagan from what they seem to me,” the editor notes, “Let us not bring a stigma upon our faith by sorrowing for our dead even more than those who have no hope.”28 When Mary mourns that Roy was “snatched away in an instant by a dreadful God, and laid out there in the wet and snow,” the editor retorts, “How prone are unregenerate mortals to indulge in hard thoughts and utter rash and insulting epithets of those from whom they imagine they have received some cruel treatment” (16). Such comments make Phelps sound blunt and impious. Circulation figures for the Sampson Low and Milner editions have not been preserved, so it is difficult to know exactly how many British readers read them. Many key figures read the unexcised version. When reviewing the novel for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Margaret Oliphant used the Sampson Low edition, praising it for its copyright status, but she quoted the passage about humor in heaven from the uncut version. 29 The novel inspired six book-length condemnations, and several of these quote from passages that Sampson Low cut. Of the six tracts against the novel, first came J.S.W., Antidote to “The Gates Ajar” (1870), a book that was published in the United States as well as Britain, which sold more than 10,000 copies and was sent to Phelps.30 That book inspired Edgar Stanway Jackson to write Faith or Fancy? An Examination of “The Gates Ajar” (1871). Also following were Watching at the Gates: A Reply to “The Gates Ajar” (1871), The Gates Ajar, Critically Examined, by a Dean (1871), The Gates Ajar, Criticized and Corrected, by an Englishwoman (1872), and Charlotte Elizabeth Tidy’s The Door Was Shut: An Answer to “Gates Ajar” (By Mrs. E. S. Phelps) (1873).31 The titles alone demonstrate the common nineteenth-century anxiety that the wider circle of readers are especially corruptible and susceptible to religious heresy and require careful moral guidance. The shift in government policy which started in August 1870

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  55 and culminated in a series of education acts to improve access to schooling for all children increased people’s anxiety about what the working classes were reading.32 Priced at six to nine pence and varying in length from 22 to 100 odd pages, these books were easily affordable. Not all six are alike; they vary in tone from mild correction to stern, contemptuous rebuke. Despite their clear differences, all six criticize elements of Phelps’s theology. Phelps’s book contains no sense of sin or penitence, writes the Dean. Most books mourn the fact that Christ is a subordinate character in Phelps’s novel in comparison to mere mortals like Roy or Aunt Winifred’s husband. They worry that Mary is more interested in seeing Roy in heaven than Christ. While Charlotte Elizabeth Tidy expresses sorrow at the fact that Phelps thinks so little of Christ, the Dean hotly accuses her of being Unitarian, so little does she respect Christ’s divinity. Several criticize Phelps for writing a vulgar and flippant book. The book is full of folly and profaneness, says the Dean. Quoting a passage, the dean says, “That any person of devout mind, or any truly godly person, could write thus flippantly on such topics, appears to us quite impossible!”33 When Aunt Winifred says Deacon Quirk’s lecture sounds like Fourth of July firecrackers, the Dean thunders that the book is full of “thoughts and expressions which we might expect to meet with in the pages of the lowest cast of vulgar literature.”34 When Aunt Winifred mentions two Hottentots in an explanation of the Resurrection, Charlotte Elizabeth Tidy exclaims, “But how shall we sufficiently testify our deep pain at the irreverent and careless way in which she writes?”35 The novel’s descriptions of heavenly pianos, machinery, and ginger-snaps were characterized as “carnal,” “heathen,” and vulgar.36 Faith came in for particular condemnation. Since many of these commentators quote from unexcised versions of the text, Sampson Low’s efforts to downplay Faith’s disobedience and humor failed to serve its probable purpose. Writes the author of Watching at the Gates, But what a very earthly creature Faith is! Surely there is some great fault in her bringing up. . . And do not treat a moral wrong as if it were only play. Wishing to go to church for the sake of caraways and best hat—then had she not better stay at home?.37 Charlotte Elizabeth Tidy criticizes the childrearing of Aunt Winifred, Faith’s mother, declaring that any child “whose earliest associations with . . . religion are ‘long-tailed prayers’ . . . caraway comfits, banging the Bible, laughing at the peculiarities of Christ’s ambassadors, and calling them ‘bully old ministers’” is not being trained “to grow up a devout and reverent Christian.”38

56  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold Sharon Estes argues that religious British readers of American pietistic novels did not consider the distinction between the two nations to be of much importance because they envisioned the world as Christian and transcendent in scope.39 As useful as that argument is, it is clear that these tracts heavily encode The Gates Ajar as an American book, all too powerful and insidious in its ability to corrupt unsuspecting English readers. Americanness and Englishness, then, were identities being developed in close proximity to each other. J.S.W. identifies Phelps as American in his first sentence, and both the Dean and the Englishwoman, true to their pseudonyms, play up the dichotomy between popular American literature and serious British literature. Writes the Englishwoman, “Truly, the book needs an ‘apology,’ and the best apology that can be found for the sentiments it introduces to English minds is, that the work is thoroughly American.”40 The Dean is also alarmed “That this American publication, so entitled, should have obtained a wide circulation even among some religious persons,” which does not bode well “for the discrimination of its readers” or for the health of the British-reading public.41 The Dean goes so far as to call her degrading views of heaven worthy of a “Red Indian.”42 In one text, Watching at the Gates, a great deal of class anxiety peaks out from beneath railing about American vulgarity. When discussing Clo’s desire for a piano, the writer exclaims, Poor little Clo! Did it never occur to you that there might be something better than a piano? Do you know, I believe God likes music even better than you do! See how much He has given us here, even without a piano. Have you not listened to the birds in the woods, or the wind in the trees on a summer evening; or the measured march of the waves, or the soft song inside a shell? And has He not given you a voice to sing with? . . . . There is so much about harps in the Bible: I suppose you never heard one, and do not know how sweet it is. And you never heard a great, grand organ, and perhaps Mrs. Forceythe [Aunt Winifred] never did. I don’t suppose there are many in Kansas [where Aunt Winifred previously lived]. Ah, if you have your piano, I shall want my organ in Heaven!43 Clo wants a piano in heaven because her family cannot afford one on earth, and the revelation that she wants one is controversial among the novel’s characters because Clo is fantasizing above her station. This passage initially faults Clo for not being satisfied with the types of music her family can afford (birds in the woods, wind in the trees, the march of waves, her voice). But rather than bemoaning middle-class materialism, as many contemporary critics of the novel have been bound to do, this condemnation moves deeper into materialism by faulting Clo, Aunt Winifred, and Phelps herself for not paying enough homage to the fine

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  57 material possessions available to them in metropolitan Britain. In this passage, Watching the Gates expresses the class anxieties bubbling beneath the surface of the other condemnations of the novel. Yet, in spite of themselves, many of the condemnations concur with elements of Phelps’s theology. Most agree with Phelps’s anthropocentric vision of heaven in which people will maintain their individuality and even, in some cases, their bodies. Furthermore, the tracts betray a fascination with her authorship. Aunt Winifred’s theology and her quirky explanations are quoted at length, enabling readers unfamiliar with Gates to use these tracts as a second introduction. The authors very much admit that by writing these discursive commentaries, they further disseminate her novel. “One can hardly copy the words,” writes J.S.W., and yet he does, copiously.44 The “Dean” who wrote The Gates Ajar, Critically Examined by a Dean sought out Phelps’s subsequent books. He read Men, Women, and Ghosts (1869), which forced him to conclude that Phelps is indeed a spiritualist, as the book depicts spirit-­rapping and other delusions. Not surprisingly, he finds Hedged In morally questionable, as it sympathetically depicts the plight of a fallen woman, throwing “around woman’s frailty such a dramatic interest that it appears rather as an amiable weakness” (62). Inadvertently, the Dean advertises Phelps’s other books, which never sold as widely as the Gates series in any country. Most crucially, these condemnations of The Gates Ajar also inspired one eloquent defense in the anonymously published, What Shall We Say About ‘The Gates Ajar’? Some Thoughts Suggested by the Proposed “Antidote” (1871). J.S.W. has a peculiar way of coupling statements together that were not spoken in connection in Phelps’s original, writes the author. For example, when Mary asks Aunt Winifred if Roy will know of Mary’s life after his death, Aunt Winifred replies, “‘I believe that he wants to know, and that he knows, Mary; though since the belief must rest on analogy and conjecture, you need not accept it as demonstrated mathematics’ she answered, with another smile.”45 J.S.W. left out the italicized statement about conjecture. In defense against critics who mock The Gates Ajar’s vulgar appreciation of humble household objects, the author quotes a crucial passage, in which Aunt Winifred emphasizes that her descriptions of heaven are metaphors: I treat Faith just as the Bible treats us, by dealing in pictures of truth that she can understand. I can make Clo and Abinadab Quirk comprehend that their pianos and machinery may not be made of literal rosewood and steel, but will be some synonyme [sic] of the thing, which will answer just such wants of their changed natures as rosewood and steel must answer now. There will be machinery and pianos in the same sense in which there will be pearl gates and harps.46

58  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold Like Gail K. Smith in her article, “From the Seminary to the Parlor,” What Shall We Say uses Phelps’s own words to talk back to writers of condemnations.47 The 1917 W.P. Nimmo, Hay and Mitchell edition of the novel edited by Frederick Hastings shares some of the same doubts about the novel as the condemners. Unlike them, Hastings clearly admired the novel, and his editorial changes do not seem inspired by religious principle, just as he was not writing for a religious publisher. Yet in the process of abridging the novel as required by his publisher, he, too, excises much of the novel’s maternal and feminist elements. Faith as a character is all but excised; not only did Hastings accept all of the Sampson Low edits, he also cut out scenes in which she plays with mud pies, plays “I spy,” rolls in the hay, and plays with Noah’s ark by her mother’s deathbed. Hastings also softens Aunt Winifred’s feminist and intellectual sides. One detail that is excised is that Aunt Winifred prefers to take care of herself even though her family has enough money to support her after the death of her husband. The fact that Aunt Winifred is “a woman who knows something about fate, free-will, and foreknowledge absolute, who is not ignorant of politics, and talks intelligently of Agassiz’s latest fossil, who can understand a German quotation, and has heard of Strauss and Neander” is cut from Hastings’s version.48 Both Aunt Winifred’s maternal feeling and her transatlantic intellectual roots are ironed out of this reading. The novel becomes less about women reaching their full potential as human beings. Hasting’s edition had minor influence mainly in Scotland. I have located only one press reference to the edition, in the Glasgow Herald, and no resurgence of interest elsewhere in the periodicals.49 However minor, though, Hasting’s edition demonstrates the irritation and fear that the novel’s feminist moments could inspire in some editors, even as late as World War I.

Praise for Non-Sectarian Pietism Apart from the conservative Protestants, many outlets hailed Phelps for her American humor, moderation, and non-sectarianism. Spiritualist magazines welcomed Gates with open arms. The novel evokes the spiritual movement in its assertion that the body will be whole and healthy in heaven. By 1869, the spiritualist movement was as strong in Britain as in the United States. The movement was transatlantic in that mediums, theorists, and enthusiasts crossed readily from one side of the water to the other, and it was dissenting in the sense that it did not follow the established church. James M’Geachy, the second British publisher of Gates, worked with James Burns in London, a publisher that also published two of the main spiritualist periodicals, Human Nature and The Spiritual Magazine. The M’Geachy edition subtitle, A Glimpse

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  59 into Heaven, emphasizes the novel’s spiritualist potential by turning Aunt Winifred’s conjectures about what might be in heaven into assured scopic pleasure. The Ward, Lock, and Tyler edition’s subtitle, Or, Our Loved Ones in Heaven, similarly plays up the spiritualist penchant for communicating with dead loved ones. Both subtitles advanced the spiritualist cause. Not surprisingly, Gates was positively reviewed in both Human Nature and The Spiritual Magazine. The latter, which catered primarily to middle-class spiritualists, wrote a cautious review of the Sampson Low edition, closing with a careful disclaimer about the novel’s scriptural merits: “To review this little work would be only to re-write it, and that probably very inefficiently” the reviewer averred. 50 Human Nature, which appealed mainly to radical working-class spiritualists who were apt to criticize the established church, recommended the James M’Geachy edition. 51 Writing from San Francisco, J. Mackie praised Phelps’s depiction of Faith: “The very truthful picture she draws of the conception children form of heaven from the teachings they receive is admirable, and the heaven which in the mind of a child is the most desirable, is also well depicted.”52 Mackie welcomes her non-sectarianism: Her arguments are principally drawn from the Bible, but liberal withal, and so unbiased that few will even venture a guess regarding which Church she belongs to, or whether she is attached to any particular denomination; hence, to Bible believers her work is invaluable.53 Other, more mainstream reviewers also found much to praise in Phelps’s novel. Of the 22 reviews I have located, all but one are positive, if not always glowing. 54 Notably, they treated the novel as successful on a stylistic level. The Glasgow Herald praised the novel’s “lucid and forcible manner,” while the Leicester Chronicle declared that “the author is young, but her talent for description and narration is great” and the Athenaeum wrote that her characters were “exquisitely drawn.”55 The publisher C. Kegan Paul, writing for the Unitarian Theological Review, praised the novel’s combination of “humor” and “pathos.”56 Rather than viewing the novel’s American origins and its typically American pietism as liabilities, they heralded the novel as a good example of American piety, a piety of humor and moderation, one that they hoped to see more of from the United States. While the Wrexham Advertiser found her work overly pietistic, C. Kegan Paul and Margaret Oliphant fervently agreed that Gates Ajar is above the common range of pietistic literature. 57 Paul, who shifted during his lifetime from the Church of England to Unitarianism, Positivism, and eventually Catholicism, wrote that most “pietistic literature” is sheer ignorance, “a hash of texts in

60  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold a nauseating Calvinistic sauce.”58 Most “pietistic” literature is from Scotland and therefore can be ignored, he wrote, but if pietistic books come “from America, they are doubly terrible, because there is a certain fascination and freshness in almost all American prose writing which induces us to skim the pages to our intellectual harm and moral disgust.”59 He  praises the “nervous and pure” language that is just different enough to remind readers that they are reading “American, not English.”60 Like Paul, Oliphant praised The Gates Ajar for rising above the level of most pietistic literature: The domestic school of novels everywhere, and especially in America, is always pious, but this is something more than piety. It is spiritual exploration, the heat of spiritual adventure; a determination to know more and see more clearly than is given to man to see or to know.61 In Gates, Phelps quotes Oliphant’s character Lauderdale from the novel A Son of the Soil (1866), who is an earthy and sensible guardian figure much like Aunt Winifred, so the exchange demonstrates the mutual admiration the women novelists shared for each other across the Atlantic. C. Kegan Paul’s response illustrates that male reviewers could be perceptive and supportive too. References to the book’s Americanness demonstrate how invested reviewers were in identifying, praising, and reinforcing American characteristics in literature. Yet, their sense of what it means to be American was disturbingly thin. None of the reviewers showed any interest in linking the novel to the cataclysmic conflict of the Civil War. Of the reviews I found, only the Spiritual Magazine identified the war, with a few other papers mentioning that Mary’s brother Roy was killed on an unspecified battlefield.62 In Chapters from a Life, Phelps firmly associates the novel with the war, writing that she wrote when “our country was dark with sorrowing women.”63 Twentieth-century critics have noted that the novel has been involved in a wider deflecting of attention from the Civil War.64 Granted, both the novel and the reviews might downplay the war because it was an ever-present and unspeakable subject. In Britain, it was also a familiar and controversial subject: the war was amply covered by the British press, and it divided Britons.65 Nevertheless, the degree to which reviews focused exclusively on the book’s ability to console the bereaved rather than the problem of grieving for dead soldiers is striking. By neglecting the war, reviewers stripped the novel of some of its political significance. This framing of the novel changed in 1917, however, when the W.P. Nimmo, Hay and Mitchell edition associated the novel with memories of the war dead. The editor Frederick Hastings wrote that he was

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  61 inspired to reprint the novel because the country was currently suffering under the kind of carnage that Americans experienced when Phelps wrote it: The little volume is indeed most arresting, for it presents views of the future life of those fallen in battle, such as are seldom met with, and such as should help to cheer many a mother, sister, wife or fiancée crushed by the sense of hopeless loss. (n.pag.)66 Whether conservative, radical, or moderate, editors and reviewers sought to build a framework of interpretation around the novel, and they often sought to domesticate readings of the novel within specifically British concerns. Reception theorists often argue that there is no original text, no original ground upon which readers build their interpretations.67 These readings of The Gates Ajar do not bear out that hypothesis. Different frames highlight different strands of the novel because the text itself is intertextual, transatlantic, pious, and anti-authoritarian. Despite editorial interventions, the strength of The Gates Ajar prevails.

Not Only Heaven, But Also Manufacturing After the popular and critical success of The Gates Ajar among the religious and the unbelievers, Phelps’s ensuing books and short stories found a ready and admiring audience in Britain. Men, Women, and Ghosts was published in Britain in November of 1869, and it was reviewed only, to my knowledge, briefly and uncontroversially in the Saturday Review and the Athenaeum.68 Hedged In, Phelps’s sympathetic treatment of an unwed working-class mother, was published simultaneously in March 1870 by Fields, Osgood in Boston and Sampson Low in London. It was reviewed positively in the Athenaeum, the radical reform vehicle the Examiner, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and John Bull.69 All four reviewers felt that Phelps met or exceeded the accomplishment of The Gates Ajar, and all four reviews were sympathetic to the plight of fallen women. Writes the Examiner, “a better commentary, in parable, on the cruel philosophy of the treatment of fallen women in crowded cities has rarely been written.”70 Margaret Oliphant was also sympathetic to the plight of fallen women, and she found the novel superior to Gates, but she faulted its timid politics. The search of Nixy Trent, the outcast working girl, for some means of honest living is “wonderfully pathetic,” to be sure, but she is “killed” at the last even though she has been rehabilitated, which balks the whole argument.71 It is not much advantage to humankind to expect fallen women to be so blameless and to become saints afterward, Oliphant wrote. Her words

62  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold illustrate how women writers could spur each other to ever higher aesthetic and political standards. Phelps’s adult and juvenile short stories, essays, and poems also gained authorized and unauthorized circulation in Britain. In terms of critical acclaim, the most major publication after The Gates Ajar was The Silent Partner, which was published simultaneously in March 1871 by Osgood and Company in Boston and Sampson Low in London, and it is to the reviews of this novel that I turn next. Out of the reviews of The Silent Partner that I have located, all had complaints but conceded that it was a good book worthy of serious attention. Reviewers saw continuity rather than discontinuity between The Gates Ajar and The Silent Partner. The Examiner noted a thematic resemblance to The Gates Ajar in a transposition of the spiritual and the earthly. While The Gates Ajar translated the earthly into the spiritual sphere, this novel imposes the spiritual on the “very matter-of-fact district in New England” which grants it an “unearthly aspect.”72 The most notable theme of the reviews is that they expressed deep fascination in the novel’s factual representations of American manufacturing. Many repeated the statement made in the book’s prefatory note that Phelps based “the facts which go to form this fiction” on research into the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, which were the first government attempt to analyze the labor question in the United States.73 Although present-day critic William Lynn Watson contends that both these reports and the novel selected and shaped the facts according to middle-class predilections, the reviewers responded to the book as an impartial source of facts about American manufacturing.74 This is just one of many examples of reviewers following a book’s own leads. It illustrates how thin reviewers’ responses could be to the less prominent titles, as they seemed to respond most consistently to a book’s paratexts and early chapters. Upon an initial read, it seems the reviewers are participating in an Anglo-­A merican contest, eagerly searching for negative statements about the US experiment to disprove rhetoric about the United States as a land of milk and honey. The Illustrated Review opens with a breathy sentence, “The condition of the manufacturing districts in the United States is not all that the admirers of American institutions imagine,” and it continues, “In the new as well as in the old country, there is the same difficulty in adjusting the rival claims of capital and labour.”75 This is a phase of New England life not usually found in New England fiction, notes the Examiner, New England normally being considered the most highly favored district of America.76 If her facts are to be believed as she says they are, notes the skeptical Saturday Review, it is plain that the evils of poverty are showing themselves despite American boasting; “[i]n short, capitalists and operatives are on no better terms there than they are with us,” universal suffrage not, for the record, bringing about a rise

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  63 in wages.77 Margaret Oliphant surmises that American manufacturing has fallen into the miseries of the Old World: The Silent Partner is such an illustration of social life as it is painful to receive from a country which we still insist upon calling the New World. Alas! it is evidently a world in which the old miseries have soon made for themselves a home, and in which some of the sharpest of our social problems have presented themselves for solution, with all the pertinacity and difficulty they display in the most ancient surroundings.78 Writes the Spectator of the lament of old factory hand Bijah Mudge, which it had just excerpted, “There is a melancholy satisfaction in reading this. There are other places besides ‘the old country’ where these problems of labour and pauperism are troubling men.”79 Yet, there are two ways one can interpret this curiosity about the misery of American manufacturing institutions. The reviewers certainly evoked the Anglo-American contest, much as twentieth-century worldwide readers gravitated toward Jack London and John Steinbeck because these authors pointed out problems with the American experiment.80 The Saturday Review’s reference to universal suffrage not ameliorating factory conditions can be taken as an argument against universal suffrage, an argument against the democratic experiment underway in the United States. Nonetheless, the reviews collectively illustrate Amanda Claybaugh’s claim that “the United States was part of the imaginative horizon of British reform.”81 British reformers frequently printed news of reform efforts in the United States to determine whether particular problems had moral or economic causes. Reform discourse created a context in which any reformer in one country could imagine changes in both. By assuring readers that Phelps drew on factual data for her fictional representations of child labor, tenement houses, industrial accidents, strikes, and agitation for a shorter working day, all of which are mentioned in the reviews, reviewers expressed their sense that reform of working and living conditions for factory workers needed to take place in both countries and similar solutions were likely to be invented, proposed, debated, and implemented. “Is it inevitable that civilization should produce [problems of labor and pauperism],” the Spectator continues, “In that thought there is certainly more melancholy than satisfaction”82 (711). To be sure, while reviewers were sympathetic with the plight of factory workers, they differed in their political opinions of structural reforms, the extent to which novelists should write about poverty and hardship, and the extent to which Phelps succeeded in offering viable solutions to the problems she represented. On the other hand, most reviewers endorsed the decision on the part of reforming heroines Perley

64  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold Kelso and Sip Garth not to marry. The Spectator singles out this element as that which will “most interest an English reader,” especially one who has watched the progress of the woman question in the United States.83 It illustrates that reviewers hoped to guide, predict, and explain reader taste. Relevant to a study of transatlantic reading is the way the phrase seeks to identify the text as foreign and the periodical and book readers as English, even though both book and readers were likely more complex.

Conclusion After the runaway success of The Gates Ajar and the modest splash of The Silent Partner, Phelps maintained her popular foothold in Britain, but she largely lost critical acclaim. Some of her books appeared in Britain in copyright editions with a variety of publishers. There is evidence in her letters to her American publisher Houghton Mifflin that she had difficulty finding a British publisher to offer simultaneous publication because her works were so often being pirated in periodicals and hence did not sell enough as books.84 The Story of Avis appeared in 1877 in a copyright edition published by Routledge that produced 4,000 copies of the book.85 One reviewer declared the book to be popular here as well as in America.86 Yet judging from the reviews, none of these books matched the critical success of the two earlier works. The Story of Avis received fewer reviews than the earlier publications, and most of them dismissed the novel within the space of a few sentences. Longer reviews by the Athenaeum and the Academy failed to mention Avis’s artistic ambitions or the novel’s woman’s rights theme of the conflict between domesticity and artistry.87 Only a glowing review from the London Morning Post, a newspaper that Coleridge wrote for earlier in the century, detailed Avis’s conflict between wanting to become a great painter and marriage and childrearing, although the reviewer blamed Avis’s “sad and chequered life” not on the inherent conflict between domesticity and artistry but on the fact that she married the wrong man.88 The Story of Avis seemed too hot to handle for most critics. Another important feminist novel, Doctor Zay (1882), was not published in Britain. It nevertheless received a probing review from the small-circulation feminist magazine the Englishwoman’s Review that mourned, “This story, though the most charming that has come from Miss Phelps’ graceful pen, is but little known in England.”89 Although contemporary scholars associate Phelps with canny rewritings of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Phelps had a following in Britain as well. By reading book editions and reviews, we can begin to trace what Phelps meant to this foreign following. As Huck Gutman argues in another study of international reception, “the way in which one culture engages another reveals much that would otherwise be hidden or ignored in each of the two cultures.”90 Both admirers and detractors registered her feminist messages about

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  65 celebrating intellectual women like Aunt Winifred, granting children precocious freedoms, encouraging ambitious women not to marry, and working toward a life of material plenty with pianos and musical evenings for all. Reviewers accepted and delighted in continuity between her pietistic work on heaven and her social reform work on urban slums and manufacturing. They left behind them enduring responses to her work, memorable for what they reveal about British culture as much as what they reveal about the works of Phelps. They turned her work into vehicles for fantasies about vulgarity and freedom. Phelps’s work certainly had transatlantic reach among both ordinary readers and leading intellectuals. The transatlantic conversations about her work should change ideas of British literary culture as wholly self-contained and of Phelps as solely an American writer. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, British editions and reviews*

The Gates Ajar British Editions Edited by the author of Alwyn Morton. Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, n.d. (June 1869). Subtitled Or, a Glimpse into Heaven. James M’Geachy, J. Burns, and J. Spiers, 1870. Serialized in The Young Englishwoman. January to September 1870. Routledge, 1870. Subtitled Or, Our Loved Ones in Heaven. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, n.d. (1870). Hamilton, 1870. Milner and Company, n.d. (1871). Hutchinson, 1890. Revised by Frederick Hastings. W.P. Nimmo, Hay, and Mitchell, n.d. (1917). British Book Commentaries on The Gates Ajar in Chronological Order W., J.S. Antidote to the Gates Ajar. Hodder and Stoughton, 1870. The Gates Ajar, Critically Examined. By a Dean. Hatchards, 1871. Jackson, E. Stanway. Faith or Fancy? An Examination of “The Gates Ajar.” London: Elliot Stock, 1871. What Shall We Say About “The Gates Ajar”? Some Thoughts Suggested by the Proposed “Antidote.” London: Eliot Stock, n.d. (1871). * Most of these periodicals are on the databases British Periodicals, British Newspapers, British Newspaper Archive, 19thC UK Periodicals, or the Modernist Journals Project. Titles of reviews are listed only if they are different from the title of the book.

66  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold The Gates Ajar, Criticized and Corrected, by an Englishwoman. Geo. John Stevenson, 1872. Tidy, Charlotte Elizabeth. The Door was Shut: An Answer to ‘Gates Ajar’ (by Mrs. E.S. Phelps). William Macintosh, 1873. Watching at the Gates: A Reply to “The Gates Ajar.” S.W. Partridge and Co., n.d. (1871). British Reviews “Local and General News.” Newcastle Journal. 15 June 1869, 3. “Literature.” Taunton Courier (Somerset). 16 June 1869, 3. “Literary Notices.” The Newcastle Courant. 18 June 1869, 3. “Literary Notices.” Oxford Times. 19 June 1869, 3. Ulverston Mirror and Furness Reflector (Lancashire). 19 June 1869, 3. Carlisle Patriot. 25 June 1869, 7. Maidstone Journal and Kentish Advertiser. 26 June 1869, 3. “New Publications.” The Bristol Mercury. 3 July 1869, 6. “Literary Notices.” Leicester Chronicle and Leicestershire Mercury. 10 July 1869, 2. “Notices of Books.” Chester Chronicle. 10 July 1869, 2. “Literary Notices.” Kelso Chronicle. 16 July 1869, 4. Wrexham Advertiser. 17 July 1869, 7. “Notice of Books: The Gates Ajar.” Spiritual Magazine. 1 August 1869, 382–3. “Literature.” Glasgow Herald. 18 December 1869, 3. “America.” Athenaeum. 25 December 1869, 861–3. “Current Literature.” Spectator. 26 March 1870, 410–11. Aberdeen Press and Journal. 22 June 1870, 6. Illustrated Times. 9 July 1870, 10. Falkirk Herald. 18 August 1870, 2. J.W. Mackie. Human Nature. 1 October 1870, 464–7. C. Kegan Paul. Theological Review. October 1870, 584–6. [Margaret Oliphant]. “American Books.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. October 1871, 422–42.

Hedged In British Edition Sampson Low, 1870. British Reviews “Novels of the Week.” Athenaeum. 23 April 1870, 547–9. “The Literary Examiner.” The Examiner. 30 April 1870, 276.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  67 “Miscellaneous Notices.” John Bull. 2 July 1870, 13. [Margaret Oliphant]. “American Books.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. October 1871, 422–42.

The Silent Partner British Edition Sampson Low, 1871. British Reviews “Novels of the Week.” The Athenaeum 1 April 1871, 398–9. “The Silent Partner.” Examiner. 8 April 1871, 365–6. “The Silent Partner.” Illustrated Review. May 1871, 513. “The Silent Partner.” Saturday Review. 6 May 1871, 573–4. “The Silent Partner.” Spectator. 10 June 1871, 711. Morning Advertiser. 22 July 1871, 6. “Recent Novels.” The Standard. 5 September 1871, 3. [Margaret Oliphant]. “American Books.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. October 1871, 422–42. “Literary Notices.” Leicester Chronicle. 29 December 1871, 5.

The Story of Avis British Edition Routledge, 1877. British Reviews “Children’s Books.” Daily News. 2 November 1877, 2. T.W. Crawley, “New Novels.” The Academy. 24 November 1877, 487–8. “Christmas Books.” Graphic. 24 November 1877, 495. “Novels of the Week.” Athenaeum.8 December 1877, 731–2. “The Story of Avis.” The Morning Post. 28 December 1877, 3.

Notes 1 A counterargument to my reading of the novel as celebrating the power of the individual to console oneself is put forth by Desirée Henderson who argues that Aunt Winifred foists her method of consolation upon Mary. Desirée Henderson, Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790–1870 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 127–57. 2 For evidence of reception in the British Empire, see these sources: “Literature,” review of The Gates Ajar, The Australasian 27 November 1869, 680; “Advertisement,” The Friend of India, 9 December 1869, 1466.

68  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold 3 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), 111. 4 Records of sales were not locatable for the British publishers Sampson Low, James M’Geachy, Ward, Lock, and Tyler, Hutchinson, Hamilton, and Milner. In the front matter to the 1896 Chapters from a Life, Houghton, Mifflin lists Gates as “in its 78th thousand,” and this publisher’s record rose to 83rd thousand in 1899 (Jacob Blanck and Michael Winship, ed., “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (Mary Adams),” Bibliography of American Literature, Vol. 8 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990], 440). Routledge publication figures are from Brian Mardment, ed., The Archives of George Routledge and Co., 1853–1902 (London: Chadwyck-Healey, 1973), Microfilm. M’Geachy sales figures are from J.W. Mackie, review of The Gates Ajar, Human Nature, 1 October 1870, 464–7. 5 Phelps, Chapters from a Life, 111. 6 Lucy Frank, “‘Bought with a Price’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Commodification of Heaven in Postbellum America,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 55, no. 2 (2nd quarter, 2009): 165–92. 7 Karen Tracey, Plots and Proposals: American Women’s Fiction, 1850–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); María Dolores Narbona Carrión, “Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers’ European Connections: The Case of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,” in New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies, ed. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson and Will Kaufman (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002), 117–29; Jennifer Cognard-Black, Narrative in the Professional Age: Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jill Bergman, “‘A Silent Partner Long Enough’: Phelps Rewrites Gaskell’s North and South,” Studies in American Fiction 33, no. 2 (Autumn 2005): 147–64. 8 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to George Eliot, 26 February 1873, in George V. Griffith, “An Epistolary Friendship: The Letters of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to George Eliot,” Legacy 18, no. 1 (April 2001): 95–96. 9 Jessica DeSpain, Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 53. 10 “Advertisement,” Saturday Review, 10 July 1869, 69. 11 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (London: Sampson Low, 1869), back matter. 12 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (London: Sampson Low, 1869), front matter. 13 See, for example, the letters from Phelps to James R. Osgood and Howard M. Ticknor (a partner in the Fields Osgood successor firm, Ticknor and Fields) in the Harvard Depository MS Thr 470 Henry Munroe Rogers collection. No pressed letter books exist for this period with copies of Osgood’s letters to Phelps. 14 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to James Osgood, 7 March 1870, Houghton Library, Harvard, Call number MS Thr 470 Henry Munroe Rogers collection (49). 15 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to Messrs. Houghton Mifflin, 10 August 1883, Houghton Library, Harvard, Call number HOU bMS Am 1925 (1855). 16 Phelps, Chapters from a Life, 111. 17 Griffith, “An Epistolary Friendship,” 99 text and n.8, 100 n.16, n.18. 18 Cognard-Black, Narrative in the Professional Age. 19 This edition was listed in the Publishers’ Circular 1 November 1869. Blanck and Winship, “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (Mary Adams),” 423. 20 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar; Or, a Glimpse into Heaven (Glasgow: James M’Geachy; London: J. Burns, and London: J. Spiers, 1870), n.pag.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  69 21 “Literature,” review of The Gates Ajar, Glasgow Herald, 18 December 1869, 3. 22 The English Catalogue of Books, Comprising the Contents of the ‘London’ and the ‘British’ Catalogues, and the Principal Works Published in the United States of America and Continental Europe, Vol. 2 Jan. 1863 to Jan 1872 (London: Sampson Low, 1873). 23 David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 200. 24 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar in Three Spiritualist Novels, edited by Nina Baym (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 2. Further references to the novel are to this edition unless otherwise noted. 25 Gail K. Smith, “From the Seminary to the Parlor: The Popularization of Hermeneutics in The Gates Ajar,” Arizona Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 123. 26 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 88, 188, 223–5. 27 The quotation is from “Books for the Young,” review of Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag, by Louisa May Alcott, Athenaeum, 7 September 1872, 303. See also “Novels of the Week,” review of Eight Cousins; or, the Aunt Hill, by Louisa May Alcott, Athenaeum, 23 October 1875, 539; Review of Concerning Children, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Athenaeum, 18 May 1901, 628–9; “The Child,” review of Concerning Children, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Academy, 14 March 1903, 245–6. 28 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (London: Milner and Company, n.d. [1871]), 15. Further references to this edition are cited in the text. 29 [Margaret Oliphant], “American Books,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1871, 422–42. 30 Blanck and Winship, “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (Mary Adams),” 450; Phelps, Chapters from a Life, 124. 31 Mary Angela Bennett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939) brought my attention to these tracts. 32 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 13; Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History 1750–1997 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), 357–61; Geoffrey Best, Mid-­Victorian ­Britain 1851–75 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), 149–70. 33 The Gates Ajar, Critically Examined, By a Dean, (London: Hatchards, 1871), 40. 34 The Gates Ajar, Critically Examined, By a Dean, 42. 35 Charlotte Elizabeth Tidy, The Door Was Shut: An Answer to ‘Gates Ajar’ (by Mrs. E.S. Phelps) (London: William Macintosh, 1873), 20. 36 Tidy, The Door Was Shut, 19. 37 Watching at the Gates: A Reply to “The Gates Ajar” (London: S.W. Partridge and Co., n.d. [1871]), 10. 38 Tidy, The Door Was Shut, 15. 39 Sharon Estes, “‘In Its English Dress’: Reading Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World as a Transatlantic Religious Bestseller,” in Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, ed. Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), 219–22. 40 The Gates Ajar, Criticized and Corrected, by an Englishwoman (London: Geo. John Stevenson, 1872), 1. 41 The Gates Ajar, Critically Examined, By a Dean, 6. 42 The Gates Ajar, Critically Examined, By a Dean, 46. 43 Watching at the Gates, 55–56.

70  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold 4 4 J.S.W. Antidote to the Gates Ajar (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1870), 12. 45 What Shall We Say about “The Gates Ajar”? Some Thoughts Suggested by the Proposed “Antidote.” (London: Eliot Stock, n.d. [1871]), 11. Italics in What Shall We Say about “The Gates Ajar”. 46 Phelps, Gates Ajar, quoted in What Shall We Say about “The Gates Ajar”, 26. 47 Smith, “From the Seminary to the Parlor.” 48 Phelps, Gates Ajar, Baym ed., 61. 49 “Literary News,” Glasgow Herald, 8 September 1917, 7. Microfilm. 50 Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebians, 1850–1910 (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1986); “Notices of Books: The Gates Ajar,” The Spiritual Magazine, 1 August 1869, 383. 51 J.W. Mackie, review of The Gates Ajar, Human Nature, 1 October 1870, 464–7. 52 Mackie, review of The Gates Ajar, 464. 53 Mackie, review of The Gates Ajar, 465. 54 All except for the Glasgow Herald review the Sampson Low edition. 55 “Literature,” review of The Gates Ajar, Glasgow Herald, 18 December 1869, 3; “Literary Notices,” review of The Gates Ajar, Leicester Chronicle, 10 July 1869, 2; “Novels and Novelettes,” review of The Gates Ajar, Athenaeum, 25 December 1869, 862. 56 C. Kegan Paul, review of The Gates Ajar, The Theological Review, October 1870, 584. 57 Review of The Gates Ajar, Wrexham Advertiser, 17 July 1869, 7; Paul, review of The Gates Ajar, Theological Review; [Oliphant], “American Books.” 58 Paul, review of The Gates Ajar, 584. 59 Paul, review of The Gates Ajar, 584. 60 Paul, review of The Gates Ajar, 585. 61 [Oliphant], “American Books,” 486. 62 “Notices of Books: The Gates Ajar,” Spiritual Magazine, 1 August 1869, 382–3. 63 Phelps, Chapters from a Life, 96. 64 Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 188: Lisa A. Long, “‘The Corporeity of Heaven’: Rehabilitating the Civil War Body in The Gates Ajar,” American Literature 69, no. 4 (December 1997): 783. 65 Richard J.M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2000); Duncan Andrew Campbell, English Public Opinion and the American Civil War (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003). 66 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar, revised by Frederick Hastings (Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, Hay, and Mitchell, n.d. [1917]), n. pag. 67 Tony Bennett, for example, argues that the concept of reading formation stresses that context internally as well as externally shapes a literary text: Tony Bennett, “Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts,” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 67. Jane Tompkins argues that when nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of Hawthorne find different things in his texts, it is because the text itself changes under different reading practices and institutional pressures: Jane Tompkins, “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne’s Literary Reputation,” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 133–54. 68 “American Literature,” review of Men, Women, and Ghosts, Saturday Review, 28 August 1869, 300–1; “Novels and Novelettes,” review of Men, Women, and Ghosts, Athenaeum, 4 December 1869, 733–4.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold  71 69 “Novels of the Week,” review of Hedged In, Athenaeum, 23 April 1870, 547–9; “The Literary Examiner,” review of Hedged In, Examiner, 30 April 1870, 276; [Oliphant], “American Books”; “Miscellaneous Notices,” review of Hedged In, John Bull, 2 July 1870, 13. 70 “The Literary Examiner,” 276. 71 [Oliphant], 440. 72 Review of The Silent Partner, Examiner, 8 April 1871, 365. 73 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner: A Novel and The Tenth of January: A Short Story (New York: Feminist Press, 1983), 7. 74 William Lynn Watson, “‘The Facts Which Go to Form This Fiction’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner and the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics Report,” College Literature 29 no. 4 (Fall 2002): 6–25. 75 Review of The Silent Partner, Illustrated Review, 513. 76 Review of The Silent Partner, Examiner, 365. 77 Review of The Silent Partner, Saturday Review, 6 May 1871, 573–4. 78 [Oliphant], “American Books,” 440. 79 Review of The Silent Partner, Spectator, 10 June 1871, 711. 80 Huck Gutman, introduction to As Others Read Us: International Perspectives on American Literature, ed. Huck Gutman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 6. 81 Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 119. 82 Review of The Silent Partner, Spectator, 711. 83 Review of The Silent Partner, Spectator, 711. 84 See Phelps to Houghton Mifflin, 10 August 1883, where she infers that Sampson Low will not be interested in Beyond the Gates because that house’s edition of Friends: A Duet sold poorly after the novel was pirated. Houghton Mifflin Archives, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Call number HOU bMS Am 1925 (1855). 85 Mardment, ed., The Archives of George Routledge and Co., 1853–1902. 86 “Literary Notices,” review of The Story of Avis, Leicester Chronicle, 29 December 1877, 5. 87 “Novels of the Week,” review of The Story of Avis, Athenaeum, 8 December 1877, 731–2; T.W. Crawley, “New Novels,” review of The Story of Avis, Academy, 24 November 1877, 487–8. 88 “The Story of Avis,” review of The Story of Avis, Morning Post, 28 December 1877, 3. 89 Review of Doctor Zay, Englishwoman’s Review, 15 September 1884, 423. 90 Gutman, introduction, 5.

3 Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in and beyond the “English Craze”

Between 1890 and 1894, Britons experienced a “craze” for the A ­ merican writer Mary Wilkins (later Freeman).1 Arthur Conan Doyle and the actress Madge Kendal raved about “A Humble Romance,” “A New England Nun,” and Pembroke. 2 Reviewers likened her tales to “brightly-­polished gems.”3 Awestruck at her skill with dialect and characterization, her ability to convey reticence and inner turmoil, they quoted poignant lines of dialogue from Joe Dagget of “A New England Nun,” Polly Moss of “Sister Liddy,” and Betsey Dole of “A Poetess.”4 They compared her artistic achievement to George Eliot and Jane Austen and did not find her wanting.5 Freeman scholars Brent Kendrick and Shirley Marchalonis have documented that Britons played a leading role in establishing Freeman’s reputation.6 Yet to date, scholars have not analyzed the ­English craze for Freeman in detail, and few associate Freeman with international fame. In this chapter, I uncover new evidence of how British reviewers and readers read Freeman, especially in terms of her nonconformist characters’ religious dissent, mostly neglected in Freeman scholarship since the 1970s. For Britons, Freeman was a new and challenging writer, with some unfamiliar coordinates. Many Britons read her through the ideologies, fears, and sectarian divisions of their own country. As the following discussion will demonstrate, notices and reviews justified an English interest in Freeman with reference to Anglo-Saxonism, the self-conscious construction of bonds between Britons and Americans on the putative basis of shared bloodlines.7 Many reviewers implied that it was the Englishness of Freeman that made her relevant to Britons. Yet in contrast, others—including Freeman’s most adulatory fans—enlisted F ­ reeman’s fiction in the cause of dissent from the British establishment. Her characters struck reviewers as too pious or willful to be considered fine racial stock. Reviewers associated her fiction with the dour, self-destructive Scottish character, Calvinism, and Irish and Scottish nationalism. Paradoxically, Freeman’s fiction became a mouthpiece for both British nationalism and British dissent. The English craze, then, was not only English, it was also a craze, irritating reviewers invested in an image of England as a sensible, moderate nation.

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  73 The Freeman craze occurred during the fin de siècle, renowned for certain paradoxes and tensions culturally and historically.8 The empire expanded at an unprecedented rate, yet the nation’s establishment believed they were on the brink of a precipice, threatened by economic depression, disgruntled urban masses, socialists, feminists, and aesthetes. Anglo-Saxonism reassured people of a strong and coherent foundation. Although the most influential spokesmen for Anglo-American diplomatic alliances, Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Balfour, would not enter the cabinet until 1895, the discourse of racial consanguinity they propounded was already in wide currency. While Anglo-Saxonism was used in the early 1890s to undercut calls for structural reforms that could rectify the kind of rural poverty and unemployment portrayed in Freeman’s fiction, other Freeman admirers such as feminists and Irish nationalists challenged the cultural establishment variously, seeing the age as one of new possibilities. New writers from diverse backgrounds responded to Freeman in a broad range of periodicals. A new magazine, the London Bookman, reviewed A Humble Romance and Other Stories in its third issue. The Pall Mall Gazette followed Freeman’s work avidly soon after the departure of the controversial editor W.T. Stead, the renowned northern radical dissenter and American enthusiast. The fact that Freeman reviews can be divided into two groups, one that vaunts her Anglo-Saxonism, and another that praises her nonconformity, exemplifies the countercurrents of the British literary scene. These twin motifs of Anglo-Saxonism and dissent were not unique to Freeman reception, yet finding them here reveals something new about women’s transatlanticism. Transatlantic scholarship has long argued that literary relations between Britain and the United States followed an antagonistic model, characterized by nationalist competition, unequal relations, and ideologically motivated misreading.9 Women were neglected in the early transatlantic scholarship, though, probably because they were assumed to not have much transatlantic reach. As a “local colorist,” Freeman might seem especially insular. Recent feminist work proposes that women’s transatlanticism follows new patterns: affinity over antagonism, reciprocity over inferiority complexes, and cosmopolitanism over nationalism.10 Such approaches obscure how women’s writing was subject to the familiar forces of competition, locally inspired reinterpretation, and ideologically motivated misreading. The following discussion will reveal that despite these challenges, Freeman navigated the ocean crossing well, dictating the terms of her reception.

The English Craze Basic questions remain about which British readers—or any foreign readers for that matter—read which Freeman stories, novels, plays, or poems in what venues. Charles Johanningsmeier argues, rightly, that

74  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Freeman bibliographies neglect evidence of foreign book or serial printings.11 The neglect arises from several factors, including practicalities and nationalist bibliographic conventions. In an example of practical difficulties, the 1959 Jacob Blanck, edited bibliography, which describes the physical features of Freeman’s volumes, lists the David Douglas edition of A Humble Romance as “unseen.”12 An example of nationalist bibliographic convention is that the MLA bibliography nominally included works by American scholars only until 1956 and was not exhaustive in its foreign coverage thereafter.13 The Freeman website created by Jeff Kaylin is an invaluable resource for press references to Freeman, but to date it includes no foreign sources. The English craze began in the spring of 1890 and ebbed after 1894. Although Freeman’s stories and poems were advertised in the British press before that date, as they were regularly appearing in American periodicals, and the girl’s magazine Atalanta published her poem “A Castle in Spain” and her juvenile story “The Silver Hen” in 1888, the craze was clearly inspired by the British book publication of A Humble Romance and Other Stories (Freeman’s first short story collection), A New England Nun and Other Stories (her second), and Pembroke (her second novel).14 According to the British Library catalogue and the English Catalogue of Books, Freeman’s first story collection, A Humble Romance and other Stories, was published in Britain in ten editions by seven different publishers (one under a different title). Two editions were authorized: a prominent Edinburgh edition published by David Douglas and a minor reprint of the Douglas edition published in Leipzig and London by Heinemann and Balestier for the Continental market.15 David Douglas included the story collection in his briskly selling American Author Series, a series of cheap but handsome editions (both Freeman volumes sold for a shilling) that played a large role in raising the prestige and popularity of American literature in Britain.16 David Douglas divided the story collection into two volumes as was common practice in his series.17 In the United States, the volume appeared in 1887 under the title A Humble Romance and Other Stories. The Douglas volumes were called A Humble Romance and Other Stories, published in March 1890, and A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories, published in April 1890. A London agent of Harper’s, James Ripley Osgood and James McIlvaine, published A New England Nun and Other Stories in May 1891 (the US edition came out in March), and Pembroke in May 1894 (the US edition came out two weeks earlier).18 These volumes received favorable notices as far afield as the Saturday Review, Hearth and Home, the Spectator, the Westminster Review, the Graphic, Atalanta, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Glasgow Herald, the Derby Mercury, and the Bristol Mercury and Daily Post. Once the Douglas volumes were published, the craze ignited. The fact that there was “something like a craze” for her stories in England was

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  75 reported in the New York periodical, the Critic, in August 1890; the article said in full: “There is said to be ‘something like a craze’ over Mary E. Wilkins’s stories among her admirers in England.”19 The Critic reported in November that the English actress Madge Kendal and her friends were “wildly delighted” by A Humble Romance. 20 In January 1891, the New York Literary News reported that Mary Wilkins disliked the idea of a transatlantic fad. 21 Nevertheless, engravings of her image appeared that year in several London magazines.22 In April 1891, the English author Louisa Parr published the short story “Sally” in Longman’s Magazine about a servant named Sally who marries a tin-peddler and drives his cart after he departs to deal with a suddenly emerged first wife. Mrs. Parr was accused of plagiarizing Freeman’s story with the same plot and title character, “A Humble Romance.”23 This literary tidbit wound through the transatlantic press and stoked the flames of Freeman’s celebrity. A New England Nun and Other Stories debuted in the excitement and was one of the bestselling books at a West End bookseller in October 1891. 24 In the following years, the name “Mary Wilkins” was synonymous with writing of exceptional reach and merit. The 1890s was the decade in which story collections began to sell in respectable numbers in Britain, and British critics began to concede that the short story was a serious art form, practiced best by the Americans and the Russians. 25 Freeman is a bigger part of this story of the growth of the short story in Britain than critics have heretofore discussed. Elaine Showalter dates the turning of the tide, in which British women writers began to use American women writers as models, to the 1890s.26 Although she gives no details about which writers she had in mind, Mary Wilkins certainly seems key. The press makes clear that aspiring English and Irish women writers of rural life were expected to follow in her footsteps; much as she herself credited Emily Brontë with inspiration, Rentoul Esler, Christopher Hare (Marian Andrews), and Jane Barlow, among others, were compared to Freeman. 27 When stories in the style of local color from the Continent were reviewed in Britain, such as the Hamburg stories of Ilse Frapan, or the Swedish stories of Perr Hallström, they were compared to those of Wilkins. 28 In a reception detail that might surprise today’s scholars, Sarah Orne Jewett’s early work was also deemed not original because she trod the same regional ground as Mary Wilkins.29 The trend grew so large that it became a cliché to say that an author “was doing for” Ireland, or Lancashire, or Cornwall, or Suffolk, “what Mary Wilkins was doing for New England”—although other writers like Sarah Orne Jewett or Hamlin Garland were mentioned in this catchphrase, Wilkins’ name appeared the most often.30 Reminiscences of becoming enchanted by Freeman’s first story collection circulated for years. In 1896, Rev. Dr. A.K.H. Boyd, a Scottish Episcopalian reverend, recollected the “exquisitely pathetic” tales of New England life by Mary Wilkins in the

76  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman two-volume A Humble Romance and Other Stories that his wife had purchased in Edinburgh.31 In some ways similar to his accolade is the sophisticated article by Sylvia Townsend Warner, who attests to finding Wilkins’s books in a stately Cambridge home as late as the 1920s.32 Britons read Freeman in original ways. First and most basically, the British book editions established her British reputation. Reviewers frequently identified the two-volume Douglas edition of A Humble Romance as the author’s first two story collections. In the British press, reviews of A Humble Romance and Other Stories appeared a few issues before reviews of A Far Away Melody and Other Stories. Prominent commentaries focused on the title stories, “A Humble Romance” and “A Far-Away Melody.” The two stories were published separately in a 1911 gift edition by Henry Frowde. The importance of the Douglas edition challenges a common argument that readers appreciate Freeman’s fiction most readily in its magazine context.33 This is especially striking given that her US publisher printed its flagship magazine (Harper’s Monthly) in which Freeman stories first appeared in London in the 1880s and 1890s.34 The fact that the “craze” began after the Douglas edition suggests that British reading was dependent on local reading patterns and concerns.

Freeman’s Stiff Upper Lip Praise for Freeman often led to reflections on the English elements of both nations. Although these comments look factual, they tap into the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism. In the following reviews, invocations of Freeman’s Englishness served conservative cultural work: they obscured the Irish and French Canadians who inhabited the real New England; posited British ethnic, national, and political homogeneity; and credited Britain with Freeman’s success. Such invocations betray anxieties about being overtaken by American competition. Notices crowed about Freeman’s British popularity: Her characters “cannot fail to interest English readers, because they are direct descendants of those men and women who went out from England for conscience sake when religious equality was a thing unknown.” Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, May 189035 Miss Mary E. Wilkins, the author of ‘A Humble Romance,’ whose writings have recently been attracting attention in this country. Pall Mall Gazette, March 189136 . . . should prove of interest to English readers, if it were only for the reason that it affords a fuller illustration of that American village life of which they are given an occasional glimpse in the contributions to American magazines. Spectator, October 189137

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  77 . . . whose tales of humble life have been so widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. Woman’s Herald, October 189338 Pembroke . . . is a work of which Americans may be proud; and it will find no more appreciative readers than in England. Times, June 189439 Pembroke at once convinces and astonishes the English reader. Spectator, June 189440 Wilkins along with Francis Hodgson Burnett, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Douglass Wiggin “are known and appreciated almost as much here as in their own country.” Times, August 189541 Repetition in journalism is not surprising. But the fact that so many papers (the Pall Mall Gazette, Woman’s Herald, and Times 1895) focus on her British popularity is significant. While some papers note her wide British readership, the Bristol Mercury explains it with reference to the English origins of her characters. The Spectator doubts whether Freeman will interest English readers (her work “should prove of interest to English readers”), while the conservative Times in 1895 is alarmed by English interest (with reference to “here” versus “their own country”). Taken together, the papers reveal doubts about “the English reader.” The fact that Freeman was so successful raised questions about what the tastes of English readers actually were. Subtly, the papers questioned whether the English should feel assured about their international cultural dominance. In this context, the Times’ proclamation about Americans being proud and English readers being the most appreciative resolves unsettled questions: are the Americans self or other? Do their successes in England suggest consanguinity or raw merit? The Times resolves these contradictions with Anglo-Saxonist logic; in grammatically parallel terms, a rising tide floats all Anglo-Saxon boats. In this way, the newspaper annexes Freeman to English literature. One review made this Anglo-Saxonist praise of Freeman’s fiction more explicit. The London weekly the Academy, which was generally snobby about American women, finds the source of New England dialect in English dialect and links both groups of people to the raw material of empire: The dialogue has evidently been taken directly from life; it is singular how nearly it resembles that commonly heard in the Weald of Kent and Sussex. The old woman who forms the desperate resolve to save her daughter’s life . . . is just one of those rugged downright persons one might as reasonably expect to find in the kingdom of

78  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman the South Saxons as in the land of the Stars and Stripes. There is enough character-stuff—if I may be permitted the word—in these primitive communities of the Weald and New England to furnish a dozen empires.42 The sourcing of New England dialect to Kent or Sussex seems factual enough, but then both sets of regional inhabitants quickly become a strong foundation for empire. Adding another layer of consanguineous fantasy, Freeman self-­ consciously cultivated her association with England. She never visited, though planned to, yet raved about the English blood in her characters and real family members throughout her fiction and correspondence.43 Most notably, the 5 December 1889 Author’s Preface written for the Douglas edition of A Humble Romance and Other Stories identifies her characters as “studies of the descendants of the Massachusetts Bay colonists, in whom can still be seen traces of those features of will and conscience, so strong as to be almost exaggerations and deformities, which characterised their ancestors.”44 She invokes the shop-worn—and potentially racist—wordplay of Old/New England: “I hope these studies of the serious and self-restrained New England villagers may perhaps give the people of Old England a kindly interest in them” (v). Given the date of the Author’s Preface, reviewers who focused on Freeman’s Englishness were following her lead. Pascale Casanova argues that international literary exchange is characterized by power struggles in which “national literary wealth, far from being the private possession of nations whose natural ‘genius’ it was supposed to express, became the weapon and the prize that both permitted and encouraged new claimants to enter international literary competition.”45 A new claimant like Freeman had to contend with the international ranking and meaning of her heritage. During the 1890s, it served Freeman’s business interest to link American literary heritage to British literary heritage. Late in her career, when her ability to place stories in US magazines declined, she bolstered herself up with the prospect of writing for England.46 Although Freeman’s works began to appear before the Chase Act made foreign royalties to American authors legally binding, David Douglas prided himself in paying his American authors fairly, and Ward and Lock sent Freeman a symbolic payment of £25, worth £1,500 in twenty-first-century currency.47 Harpers also paid her ample royalties. Freeman acted modestly in her business dealings, yet, for her, she was remarkably self-conscious about how heritage became weapon and prize. Few of the reviewers I discuss use the term Anglo-Saxon, a term that was beginning to inspire resistance in this decade in which racial terminologies were honed.48 But some reviewers followed through ideas about a New England race to sinister conclusions. In 1887, William Dean Howells wrote that Freeman’s characters “are of one New England

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  79 blood, and speak one racy tongue.”49 The London Bookman reviewer of the Douglas edition expresses alarm over New England’s literary wealth: We have yet another writer of tales of New England. No country of a like area ever produced so many novelists as that rocky land. Hawthorne, Mrs. Stowe, Miss Alcott, and a host of others have given the world pictures of New England life. The soil remains fruitful, and we are eager as ever to welcome its new productions, and to learn all that may be said about a life so near to us in so many ways, so far from us in others.50 The pungency exemplifies the style of British reviews. Yet, the hyperbole (“No country of a like area”) suggests emotional investment. Alarm quickly slides into questioning whether the New Englanders are self or other (“so near to us” yet “so far”). The review questioned whether British readers should be proud of Freeman’s weightiness or relieved at her cheerful American superficiality. After proclaiming the stories’ American uniqueness, the review points to the stories’ Scottish piety, frugality, and eccentricity: the characters unite modern ideas with “ultra-Scotch Calvinism,” for they “grew up on their hard soil, and under a severe and oppressive sky, always independent, often eccentric, with the virtues and the faults of a vigorous race” (22). National ideologies often resolve internal contradictions through compartmentalization. This review compartmentalizes the British people into the dour Scots on the one hand and the wholesome English on the other. The review was probably written by the English author Agnes MacDonnell. Unlike other Bookman reviews, it is anonymous, “by the author of ‘Quaker Cousins.’” An 1879 novel of this name by MacDonnell, who remains obscure today, was published in London by Hurst and Blackett. MacDonnell was a competitor of Freeman’s, another writer of country life, although comparatively highbrow and genteel (Quaker Cousins features a moneyed Quaker draper in a picturesque English country town, and the anonymity suggests an older model of authorship). MacDonnell closes with a barbed comparison to Elizabeth Gaskell. While Gaskell is “tragic” and “somber,” Wilkins is cheerful because of the thinness and immaturity of her nation: American life is not tragic or sombre. The great future before it—the great prosperity of the American nation—determines the national mood and makes it cheerful, in spite of the individual sorrows. American literature reflects a serene sky, and there is in it none of that deep undercurrent of passionate feeling born of the memories of oppression and struggle, a long history of endurance of evil, and battles lost and won, which flows under our best gaiety and content. (25)

80  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman While Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was welcomed for writing with humor and moderation, this comment about American literature’s shallow cheer is damning. From June 1899 to September 1901, Anglo-Saxonism enjoyed a new vehicle in the Anglo-Saxon Review, an opulent quarterly established and edited by Lady Randolph Churchill. Freeman never published in the quarterly, but her correspondence suggests that she nearly did. Upon request from Lady Churchill, Freeman submitted a manuscript, which was accepted at a rate that did not satisfy Freeman, who lived off the returns of her literary work. Freeman offered the manuscript to Florence E. Bate, editor at McClure’s. Brent Kendrick identifies the manuscript as “The Happy Day,” which appeared in McClure’s in 1903. 51 If “The Happy Day” is the text that nearly linked Freeman directly to Anglo-Saxonism, it is an eccentric contribution. It touts racial supremacy, but it celebrates French stock and the heights attained by all civilized societies. Falling short of Freeman’s usual artistic standard, the story features a rustic French family’s visit to the Paris Exposition of 1900. Family members are fervently joyous about their day, so unreservedly gay that one might have questioned if they had ever known of sorrow, yet their ancestors had starved on the starved land before the Revolution, and there had been nothing except poverty and privation in their own lot. But they had kept untarnished and unscathed through it all, as if it had been a precious family jewel, their power to make merry and keep holidays in the midst of their ceaseless pilgrimage through the valley of shadows.52 The rustics symbolize the kernel of good character that makes France strong and shields it from the hazards of social change. In writing about cheerful European peasants, Freeman rebutted MacDonnell’s assertion about cheer being American. The journey of “A Happy Day” through the transatlantic magazine world suggests that Freeman courted racial thinking but desisted from exploiting it fully—even when given the opportunity to do so. The dominant trend among British reviewers was to claim Freeman as part of an Anglo-Saxon family and thus as one of their own. Even so, there is an irony about a regional writer inspiring discussions of American and British national superiority.53 Freeman’s fiction complicates the idea of New England as the site of the nation’s virtue by emphasizing poverty and featuring characters, like Polly Moss of “Sister Liddy” and Betsey Dole of “A Poetess,” who are physically disabled or mentally aberrant. In fact, select reviewers did not merely praise Freeman’s ability to capture the dialect and sentiment of poverty but linked her reading of poverty to an iconoclastic reading of the United States. A long piece about what the reviewer calls “local fiction” in the Irish paper Freeman’s

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  81 Journal (Dublin) claimed that local fiction troubled the typical view of the United States as a go-ahead, mechanically advanced nation, full of millionaires, political bosses, and Western barrooms. Few understand that there are settled parts of the United States where people have been living “staid and quiet lives” in the same place for generations, and despite the Irish peasant’s image of the United States as a golden land of promise, there are “folk amongst whom are plenty of the poor people and humble, and who have to toil sternly for a not too luxurious fare.”54 In fact, in 1902, long after the Craze, Freeman was cited as a writer by the Academy as a writer who could teach the British how to write about laborers with truth, not condescension.55 This type of regional variety worried one Anglo-Saxonist British critic. When Walter Besant learned about the vogue for local color in Chicago, he wrote that we have little idea in England generally of the infinite varieties of life and of conditions and of manners which forbid the American people from being described as one homogeneous population. Therefore we are most of us a little surprised perhaps to find that there is an American village literature, if we may call it so, springing up everywhere in America.56 The affected modesty of these words (people have “little idea,” they are “a little surprised”) suggests rhetorical ploy. Besant constructs Anglo-­ Saxonism in America as the norm and diversity as the exception. The word “forbid” scorns schoolmarms who insist on precision. Other critics who focused on the eccentricity of Freeman’s characters used her fiction to explore dissent in their own nation.

Freeman’s Lonely Souls The Puritanism of Freeman’s fiction raised more heated discussion in Britain than in the United States. Reviewers sounded genuinely worried about the religious underpinnings of her characters’ stubbornness and inflexibility. While American reviewers identified Wilkins’s characters as Yankee, Pilgrim, or Puritan, and only twice in my findings as Calvinist, British reviewers commonly identified them as Scotch Calvinist, Presbyterian, or Nonconformist.57 This shift in terminology signals adaptation to reviewers’ sectarian bugaboos. The terms “New England” and “Puritanism” had different utility in the different countries. In the United States, particularly after the turn of the century, “Puritan” meant old-fashioned or sexually repressed.58 In Britain, Puritanism summoned a series of associations with dissent. First, it meant a political threat of disestablishing the Church of England. In the 1870s, nonconformists from Manchester campaigned to

82  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman disestablish the church, and the parliamentary and public reactions to their efforts were profound. People feared that believers with too much spiritual energy would gain local control.59 Second, nonconformism meant any public discussion of religion, increasingly viewed as awkward and irritating. The English associated themselves with temperate moderation, in contrast to the Irish, Scots, and Americans.60 Third, nonconformism was associated with mental imbalance, mysticism, and eccentricity. Finally, it meant dissent of any kind. As Paul Giles argues, English writers used religious nonconformity “as a reference point for philosophical dissent and an exemplification of the insufficiency of self-enclosed and self-defining national values.”61 Freeman appealed to readers who explored religion’s potentially fruitful role in public life. David Douglas, her Edinburgh publisher, was formerly the editor of the North British Review, founded as an alternative to both the strictly non-religious Edinburgh Review and the theological journals.62 Douglas, like the Reverend Boyd, whose reminiscences of Freeman were discussed earlier, belonged to the Broad Church, a liberal Anglican branch. Arthur Conan Doyle, who declared Pembroke the greatest American fiction since The Scarlet Letter, was another figure intrigued by the religious undertones of British life.63 In 1892, the Spectator ran “The Ossification of the Will,” a commentary on this Freeman theme.64 The article focuses exclusively on Marcus Woodman of “A Conflict Ended,” published in A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories. Woodman plants himself on the steps of the Congregational church in protest against a new minister’s doctrines. His stubbornness costs him his fiancée, Esther Barney. The titular conflict ends when Esther and her shadow Margy put aside their pride and tolerate their lovers’ flaws. Woodman had another British fan; in 1902, the Welsh-Scottish writer Arthur Machen—a dissenting eccentric in his own right—named Woodman as the archetypical ecstatic lonely soul.65 What most disturbs the Spectator is the “picture of a will which, by the redundant vehemence of its premature volition, so completely mortgages, as it were, its own future” (11). This paralysis of the will “is the nearest approach we have in our human life to the theological conception of predestination to reprobation” (11). It is “self-predestination” of “ungovernable” strength (11). This self-predestination can also be found in the “arbitrary asceticism or expiatory passion of Hindoos.” Both groups share “religious fatalism” (12), and it is similar to the fatalism of old English provinces, like the Yorkshire of the Brontës (12). Although contemptible, it is preferable to the “flaccidity of the will” found in “our own rapidly moving cities, where not only is everything mutable, but there is a sort of pride in never being consistent with yourself” (12). Yorkshire dissenters, Calvinist colonials, Hindu supplicants: people resisting British rule are assembled and contrasted to the banal but governable city. The fact that the Spectator considered a single Freeman story

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  83 worthy of such scrutiny, and such vehement language, demands attention. There were serious philosophical and political issues at stake in reading Freeman in Britain. Freeman’s British popularity caused concern not only because she was an American and a woman but also because it portended modern religious diversity. The Spectator’s review of Pembroke complains further about “victims of this malignant sort of predestinarianism.”66 On the inflexible Barnabas Thayer, Richard Alger, and Deborah Thayer, the writer says, “To us the New England characters are all strange, except so far as Miss Wilkins has herself rendered them familiar by her famous stories”; they are unlike “those to which we are accustomed at home” (859). This reference to difference is rhetorical, as the reviewer distances “English” readers from painful theological questions. The writer associates Freeman with the irrationality of ancient races. Because both Barnabus and Richard repress their desire for marriage, such fixity of will involves the “crucifixion” of “the natural product” of desire. Their wills malfunction with “a kind of portcullis snap on some perfectly irrational decision” (858). Summoning images of Roman tyrants and medieval fortresses, the reviewer used Freeman’s fiction to define Englishness as moderate and controlled. The review author remains unknown.67 Under the co-­editorship of Richard Holt Hutton, a son of a Unitarian minister and a convert to Anglicanism, the Spectator espoused Broad Church theology and hence was more liberal than Freeman’s Congregationalist characters.68 Some nonconformists were Anglo-Saxonist anti-Catholics, but this review treats nonconformists as an aberrant threat akin to the foreign. An Edinburgh Review piece about Pembroke and other US novels treats religious dissent as a modern phenomenon. The Wellesley Index attributes the piece to Stephen Lucius Gwynn.69 Gwynn was a Protestant Irish freelance writer in London who later became an MP, Irish nationalist, and literary scholar. The Edinburgh Review did not espouse Scottish or Irish nationalism; headquartered in London, its assumed readership was English.70 Gwynn’s review highlights sectarian and national divisions, though; it is one example in the Wilkins reception in which, as transatlantic scholar Joseph Rezek has written, “Irish, Scottish, and American rivalries with England were interconnected phenomena: discourses and practices that were mutually reinforcing, cross-­pollinating, and fueled by powerful and surprising analogies across time and space.”71 Gwynn praises the US literary trend of documentary fiction, in which authors project “an extraordinary concentration of intelligence upon the task of portraying not merely individual character, but the character of communities. No country in the world’s history has ever offered a better chance for such works of art” (386). Such hyperbole promotes both the US literature and the possibility of Irish literature. Gwynn associates all recent American fiction with “Nonconformism.” The word made little sense in Edinburgh: one, the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian

84  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and had tried to become the established church in England; two, a Free Church of Scotland had just formed; and three, Scots increasingly attended Episcopalian services.72 The word’s lack of local utility suggests that Gwynn treats nonconformity as an entry to broad philosophical and political dissent. Gwynn depicts nonconformity as violent, extreme, and incongruous, yet nevertheless admirable and vital. He sounds amused, not frightened: The American people are above all Nonconformist; one feels that in Mr. Harold Frederic’s merciless study of their religious phases; one feels it in Mr. Fuller’s sketches of Chicago, with its riches won since yesterday, conscientiously endeavoring to invent social forms and adopt luxuries, yet ill at ease among them. The old Puritan breaks out in spite of deep carpets piled over him and butlers sitting on his head. One sees nonconformity even in Mr. Stephen Crane’s sketches of American war, where every soldier in the ranks is a critic; but one sees it most of all in Miss Wilkins, and one realizes from her that New England is the true matrix of the American type. Americans may have got from elsewhere their versatility, their calculating power, and their passion for novelty; but they took from New England the quality which they themselves call grit. The stiff long upper lip, the gaunt angular outline, express accurately enough Miss Wilkins’s characters; these are attributes neither lovely nor endearing, but they inevitably command respect, and the race which has them in the end succeeds inevitably. (392–3) Images of Puritanism in this passage resemble those throughout Scottish and American literatures: a merciless tendency to scrutinize oneself for signs of one’s moral worth, a diligence in worldly business, and a tendency to shift suddenly from self-abnegation to self-assertion.73 What is interesting is that Gwynn treats Calvinism and Anglo-Saxonism as interchangeable. Self-scrutiny leads directly to a stiff upper lip and the ability to command respect. Like others, Gwynn takes credit for the best that the United States offers, but the best is the dissenting English type. Gwynn also identifies Freeman with Scottish fiction, the school initiated by John Galt’s The Ayrshire Legatees (1821). Freeman received glowing reviews from such Scottish papers as the Glasgow Herald and the Scots Observer, and her work was widely associated with Scottishness.74 Such reflections contrast markedly with American discussions of Puritanism, such as Perry Westbrook’s, which relegate it to a harmless past irrevocably eroded by railroads and consumerism.75 In light of the British reception, today’s readers might read Freeman’s characters’ religiosity as part of a modern mosaic of competing beliefs. As well as “A Conflict Ended” and Pembroke, the story “A Far-Away Melody” exemplifies the religious and mystical Freeman. A titular story in the British 1890s, it

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  85 receives little notice in the United States today.76 Much like the widely anthologized stories “A Church Mouse” (1889) and “A Village Singer” (1889), the story features religious women characters who court social disgrace, ministerial discipline, and God’s wrath by practicing religion independently. In the story, Priscilla and Mary Brown seem like dutiful followers of conventional Christianity: Both sisters were eminently practical in all affairs of life, down to their very dreams, and Priscilla especially so. She had dealt in religion with the bare facts of sin and repentance, future punishment and reward. She had dwelt very little, probably, upon the poetic splendors of the Eternal City, and talked about them still less. Indeed, she had always been reticent about her religious convictions, and had said very little about them even to her sister.77 Suddenly, however, Priscilla feels the proximity of death. She ruminates about heaven: “I wonder, Mary,” said she, “if it would seem so very queer to die a mornin’ like this, say. Don’t you believe there’s apple branches a-hangin’ over them walls made out of precious stones, like these, only there ain’t any dead limbs among ‘em, and they’re all covered thick with flowers? An’ I wonder if it would seem such an awful change to go from this air into the air of the New Jerusalem.” (14) Much like Mary Cabot in Phelps’s The Gates Ajar as discussed in ­Chapter 2, Priscilla imagines that heaven might contain familiar settings and tangible pleasures, and her Congregationalist sister is scandalized. Mary Brown fears death, although a good Congregationalist should neither fear death nor long for beauty in heaven. Priscilla hears a far-away melody before she dies. Mary quickly follows, hearing the same melody. The sisters exhibit self-abnegation rather than the covert self-fulfillment that has interested feminist Freeman scholars since Toth’s essay, which is generally considered to lay the conceptual groundwork for feminist readings of Freeman’s work.78 But rather than old-fashioned Puritans, Priscilla and Mary Brown resemble spiritualist mystics.

Feminist Dissent Feminist readings of Freeman were present but fleeting and homeless in these decades. At first glance, the British reviews seem to utterly lack feminist dissent. To be sure, many reviewers appreciated Freeman’s focus on “struggling households, faded elderly women, and broken-down men,” praising her sympathy for spinsters and other small-town folk who fail to fit ideal gender and sexual roles.79 As present-day Freeman critic

86  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman ­ oris J. Turkes has noted, Agnes MacDonnell’s review is more perceptive D about Freeman’s aging women than are all the early t­ wentieth-century analyses.80 Reviewers who noted Freeman’s focus on plucky unmarried women could be gently satirical rather than complimentary. In a complaint about the monotony of Freeman’s plots, the Saturday Review mourns that “the heroines rather too invariably reach the age of sixty before the widowed mother who has separated two fond hearts withdraws her opposition, and the heroine a little too frequently makes the first advance towards reconciliation.”81 Clearly, the plots are not just monotonous but too full of headstrong women. Nearly all the reviews neglect to discuss the subplot of Pembroke in which Deborah Thayer’s daughter Rebecca rebels against her mother’s Puritan strictures by becoming pregnant out of wedlock and forced into a shameful marriage. Only the liberal weekly, the Speaker, mentions it, and then only to condemn the “incident of vice” which comes “straight from the erotic school.”82 That said, the novel itself grants Rebecca’s plot the least amount of detail or focalization; as Leah Blatt Glasser has argued, Freeman, the author, often conveyed fear of the rebellious characters she unleashed in her fiction, so it is not surprising that reviewers followed suit and did not explore Rebecca’s feminist potential.83 Feminist literary criticism was not an impossibility in this decade. Scholars have found a feminist sensibility in the mainstream British periodical press dating from the 1860s.84 In particular, as established by Molly Youngkin, two periodicals of the woman’s press during the 1890s, the magazines Shafts and the Woman’s Herald, conceived of literary representation as a method to advance the cause of women.85 Reviewing novels and poetry collections far more than other woman’s magazines such as Atalanta, Hearth and Home, or the Girls’ Own Paper, these periodicals developed a “systematic reviewing apparatus that placed strong emphasis on both the connection between literary representation and social change and the connection between content and form within literary representation.”86 Reviewers sought out novels by men and women that represented woman’s agency through internal perspective, which indicated transformations of consciousness, dialogue, which indicated women’s use of the spoken word, and descriptions of characters’ actions. Reviewers were as inclusive as possible—so long as authors made an attempt to represent women’s agency, reviewers gave them accolades.87 Yet despite their veritable importance in bolstering feminist literary criticism, Shafts and the Woman’s Herald paid only selective attention to the work of American women writers. Items were frequently reprinted from the Woman’s Journal in Boston and other American papers, and the 1895 T. Fisher Unwin edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s poetry collection In This Our World was warmly feted by Shafts, as I discuss in Chapter 5. In pieces on Freeman published in the Woman’s Herald and the rest of the material I will discuss in this section, Freeman’s fiction rarely received a strictly feminist analysis along the lines that Youngkin

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  87 found in reviews of novels by Sarah Grand and Mona Caird. In fact, one of Freeman’s stories that most emphasizes women’s agency in consciousness, spoken word, and action, “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” (1890), is rarely singled out for analysis or commendation in the British reviews. In this story, Sarah Penn grows fed up after 40 years of marriage in a small and cheaply decorated house. When she realizes her husband is building an unnecessary new barn in the spot he promised a nice house would stand, she rebels by moving the household into the barn. Part of the humor of this story and many other Freeman stories derives from the protagonist’s combination of surface meekness and underlying resolve, so the story reveals little about Sarah’s consciousness. Yet, Sarah speaks bluntly, such as when she tells the minister, I’ve got my own mind an’ my own feet, an’ I’m goin’ to think my own thoughts an’ go my own ways, an’ nobody but the Lord is goin’ to dictate to me unless I’ve a mind to have him.88 And of course, her actions speak more loudly, not only to her husband, but also to the townspeople. The story was perhaps the most famous Freeman story in the United States in her day.89 Yet when “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” was selected as one of the best 12 American short stories by the New York Critic, the Academy wrote that they would have chosen “A Humble Romance” (1884).90 In “A Humble Romance,” the heroine Sally showcases her own agency, as she takes over Jake’s business until his miraculous return. But Sally speaks less bravely than Sarah does, and her husband’s courtship tactics are disturbingly forceful; the earlier story is the less feminist. While Freeman’s work received little feminist critical attention, there were venues that celebrated her achievements as a woman and as a writer for women who expressed their unarticulated passions, fears, and concerns. In this sense in corners of the market, her fiction was observed from a perspective that took into account the significance of gender in life and art and viewed the female gender as a positive factor; this looser definition of feminist criticism is often followed today.91 To begin with, the Ward and Lock edition of A Humble Romance and Other Stories appeared in a list with more attention to women writers than the David Douglas series. The publishing company Ward and Lock (known as Ward, Lock, and Bowden Company from 1891 to 1893) reprinted unauthorized editions of Anglophone women’s writing by Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, Susan Coolidge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Maria Edgeworth, and Fanny Fern, both in their Lily Series, and in their various magazines.92 A comparison between the paper cover of David Douglas’s A Humble Romance and Other Stories and the frontispiece of the Ward and Lock edition suggests that the unauthorized publisher packaged her work with a celebration of femininity and passion (­Figures 3.1 and 3.2).

Figure 3.1  T he paper cover of A Humble Romance and Other Stories (David Douglas, 1890). © British Library Board, Shelfmark 12705.aaa.21.

Figure 3.2  T  he frontispiece of A Humble Romance and Other Stories (Ward, Lock, and Bowden 1893). © British Library Board, Shelfmark 12705.dd.27.

90  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman The Douglas edition is a tasteful forest green and white, accenting the intricate floral imagery. The name of the author appears genderless as “M.E. Wilkins.” The picture of Sally and Jake is peaceful and rather stiff. There is a focus on setting rather than interpersonal dynamics. In contrast, the Ward and Lock frontispiece is flashy and romantic. The book’s title and Wilkins’ gendered first name blaze in large, brown cursive across the page. The color scheme is green, beige, and dark brown. Sally and Jake similarly appear in their cart, but the cart lacks a cover, and the characters are caught in a moment of intimacy. Sally’s head nestles on Jake’s shoulder, and her arm rises into the air as if she is about to embrace him. Jake grabs her wrists, as if trying to stop her, and it looks as if their pent-up passion is being released. The frontispiece is a sign that the woman-identified Freeman of sentimental victims, poverty, passion, desire, and longing was appreciated by readers in the 1890s. It also illustrates Melissa Homestead’s claim that the culture of reprinting without permission or payment, though derided by Freeman herself, supported the literary production of women and other people of disadvantaged groups.93 During the height of the English craze, one rumor circulating around the British press about Freeman was that she was a secretary of Oliver Wendell Holmes.94 In comparison to such falsifications, women’s magazines were accurate and sympathetic. They popularized her celebrity as a woman writer writing for women, and they laid the conceptual and aesthetic groundwork for understanding how this focus has subversive potential. At the same time, they tended to trivialize Freeman and her femininity. Increasingly through the 1890s, they treated her work as a bulwark against less Anglo-Saxon, more degenerate fictions. Women’s magazine profiles of Freeman explicitly placed Freeman in a network of literary women; all of them stressed that her family was dead and she was alone in the world, and one named the childhood companion in whose family home Freeman lived at the time, Mary Wales.95 Significantly, the reference to Mary Wales appears in the most feminist of these periodicals, the Woman’s Herald, and it reads in full: “Miss Wales, her special school friend, is the companion of her successes now, and it is under the roof of this friend’s parents that her own rooms make her own home.”96 Present-day scholars emphasize the supportive intimacy of the relationship between Wilkins and Wales, suggesting that it might have had sexual elements.97 Profiles also mentioned Mary Booth, the editor of the women’s magazine Harper’s Bazar, who discovered Freeman; Sarah Orne Jewett; Mary Hartwell Catherwood; Kate Upson Clarke; and an unnamed Frenchwoman asking for permission to translate her work. The Woman’s Herald reprinted a piece from The Union Signal (a periodical published by the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Chicago) by the American temperance reformer Frances Willard identifying Mary Wilkins as one of the notable spinsters of the

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  91 Anglophone world.98 By linking Wilkins with other spinsters and independent women, the magazines portrayed singleness and artistic ambition as positive prospects for women. True to the genre, the profiles also described the writer’s study. A typical description appears in the Woman at Home: In her Randolph home Miss Wilkins occupies two pretty rooms, which are full of her own delightful personality. One is a terra-cotta room, containing a quaint desk of bog oak, surrounded by Hindu relics. The other is decorated in old blue, and has a wide, old-­fashioned hearth. Near the hearth stands a bureau with brass hinges and locks, and a couch with a Baghdad rug thrown over it. Old candlesticks, pewter plates, and other antiquities adorn Miss Wilkins’s rooms. The distinguished novelist does her writing for the most part on a tablet on her knees, and can work in a room where people are talking and laughing.99 These words exemplify the magazines’ tendency to trivialize the concept of a woman writer. Freeman is praised for her domestic skill. Her rooms are called “pretty,” and she herself is given a non-threatening “delightful personality.” She is associated not with frightening modern décor but with antiquities, although notably not only Anglo-Saxon antiquities.100 The praise for the modesty of the woman writer who writes in company was a cliché. And yet, such trivializing discussions implicitly reveal a point that more socially central accolades for her concealed—the fact that she lived in rooms in another family’s home for much of her writing career. The longing for architecture and independence is a common theme in her life and work that contemporary Freeman scholars still explore.101 The women’s magazines time and again urged women readers to turn to Freeman as an example of a woman writer of great quality, a writer who could serve as a model of good comportment. The Woman’s Signal recommended Freeman’s A Far-Away Melody for mother’s groups.102 In a review, Atalanta praises her stories’ “charm,” their “exquisite taste and touch.” The reviewer continues, “Books such as these are not ones to be rushed through in a hasty loan from some circulating library.”103 In general, the women’s magazines were silent on the question of nationalist rivalry between Britain and the United States. Given the repetitive discussions of Freeman’s English roots elsewhere in the British press, their silence might portend distaste for national competition. A sentiment akin to Anglo-Saxonism entered the women’s magazines most perniciously when Freeman was compared to New Woman writers. These magazines instructed their readers to prefer Freeman over Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), Emma Frances Brooks’ A Superfluous Woman (1894), and Iota’s A Yellow Aster (1894). Although in

92  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman American literary studies, “New Woman fiction” is a label attached to a wide variety of writing, including Freeman’s, in Britain in the 1890s, the label was more specific.104 The term itself was coined in 1894, and throughout 1894, many articles for and against the New Woman appeared in the British press. More overtly than the work of Freeman or other women writers from earlier in the century, New Woman novels appeared that questioned whether women should marry, whether good women felt sexual desire, and whether women’s health could tolerate the rigors of an education. Outside the women’s press, Israel Zangwill, too, contrasted Mary Wilkins to the work of the New Woman writers: “Though her range seems limited,” he acknowledged, “few Englishwomen are doing as admirable work as Miss Wilkins. The ladies on her side of the Atlantic seem to be free from the tendency to ephemeral pamphlet-fiction, which is here characteristic of the ‘New Womanhood’ of letters.”105 The reading public’s obsession with the New Woman inevitably influenced their readings of Freeman. In September 1893, the editor of Hearth and Home responded to a correspondent’s request to review recent fiction with the directive that “Dodo”—Edward Frederic Benson’s 1893 novel Dodo: A Detail of the Day—was “one of the most vulgar and worthless of books that I have come across for many a long year.” The novel was then associated with the New Woman. The editor also warns the reader against The Heavenly Twins, because it reads more like a “pamphlet” than “literature.” Instead, readers should seek out the “great living novelists” Meredith, Stevenson, Mark Rutherford, Hardy, Mary Wilkins, Cable, and Mrs. Richmond Ritchie.106 In August 1894, a letter from a critic who wrote for several Victorian periodicals, Frances E. Ashwell, was printed in the Woman’s Signal in defense of the New Woman and naturalist writing against which the magazine had warned its readers. Ashwell began by declaring that Henrik Ibsen does not “repress the Angel in the animal,” as the magazine had complained that he does, but follows the “healthy-body-healthymind view of human well-being.” Ashwell defended the New Woman writers against the charge that they were merely frivolous. She defended her own ability to read New Woman fiction alongside respectable women’s fiction: I have read “Dodo,” “The Heavenly Twins,” “The Superfluous Woman,” and “The Yellow Aster,” in their due season, without neglecting the works of Miss Jane Barlow, Miss Mary Wilkins, and Mrs. Rentoul Esler.107 Ashwell’s retort illustrates the way in which Freeman was being categorized alongside English and Irish women writers of religious rural life, under the assumption that this writing was not openly sexual and did not call for structural reforms and was therefore safe for women readers.

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  93 Ashwell does not mention whether she had read Pembroke, which had been published in Britain three months earlier and appeared on bestseller lists alongside The Heavenly Twins and A Yellow Aster.108 Perhaps Ashwell viewed Freeman as safe and respectable, or perhaps she saw similarities between Freeman’s work and that of the New Woman writers. In the dominant discourse of the day, Freeman was coded as an Anglo-Saxon writer about whom British women could be proud, while the other writers were new, decadent, and degenerate. Ashwell’s letter anticipates Monika Elbert’s argument that Freeman, formerly misclassified as a regionalist, should be read as a naturalist.109 In this way, as the decade unfolded, women’s magazines did not serve Freeman with the best possible set of readers, any more than other periodicals did.

Conclusion Freeman’s fiction continued to receive critical and popular acclaim in Britain throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century. Her other books that appeared during the Craze, The Pot of Gold and Other Stories (1892), Young Lucretia and Other Stories (1892), and Jane Field (1892), received good reviews. Her volumes Madelon (1896), Jerome (1897), Silence and Other Stories (1898), The Heart’s Highway (1900), and Understudies (1901) all topped wholesale bestseller lists, Silence in Scotland, and the rest in England.110 Like the earlier volumes, these volumes received positive reviews. Harper’s published most of her books once their London office was established, and their royalty ledgers show that they paid Freeman the most royalties of any author in many of the six-month periods up to 1910. Her royalty payments surpassed those of Thomas Hardy and William Dean Howells.111 Increasingly, British reviewers complained that her tales of New England were predictable and monotonous, and they generally did not applaud when she departed from her traditional mode. In this respect, they were similar to American reviewers as analyzed by Shirley Marchalonis.112 However, some reviewers associated Freeman with surprisingly biting tales of poor folk. The Portion of Labour (1901), Freeman’s novel about factory workers, received largely good reviews. The Athenaeum and the Academy published positive reviews about the novel, while the Speaker complained of its melodrama and the Saturday Review found it unconvincing—but both the Speaker and the Saturday Review wrote that its descriptions of factory life rung true.113 The Dublin Review singled out The Portion of Labour in Freeman’s oeuvre for its laudable turn to wider social issues.114 UK reviews differed from the US reviews of this novel, which questioned this “delicate” writer’s ability to portray the gritty subjects of strikes and factory life.115 Much like with Phelps’s The Silent Partner, then, British reviewers granted American middle-class women writers the authority to launch blows against American industrialism.

94  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Unlike many women writers of her generation, Freeman never entirely disappeared and never needed to be rediscovered in full by feminist literary critics. Not only were her volumes found in a stately Cambridgeshire home in the 1920s by Sylvia Townsend Warner, but the Tauchnitz editions of her books continued to be listed in that publisher’s catalogues until after 1939.116 These English-language editions of American and British books were sold largely on the Continent but also found in tourist watering holes throughout the world. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s musing about how deeply Freeman influenced her own sense of New England was published in The New Yorker in 1966, just before “feminist literary criticism” became a keyword. Why did David Douglas choose to publish Freeman in his influential American Authors Series? Why did his edition appear three years after her story collection was published in the United States, thus delaying a symbolically important badge of distinction for her, and putting her stories from the 1880s in unfortunately direct contrast with the explicitly sexual and topical New Woman fictions? Questions remain. David Douglas’s extent records consist of scrapbooks he compiled for his daughter in 1906 now housed at the National Library of Scotland. On one page of the scrapbook are pasted two letters from Freeman, which are formal and stilted in comparison to letters that grateful male American authors sent Douglas. Typed on the side is this statement from Douglas: Miss Wilkins, (now wife of Dr. C.M. Freeman), I have never seen, but her “Faraway Melody” and other short stories of New England life, made her popular in this country and her letters make me desirous of meeting her on this side. She sent me marriage cards and I trust we shall yet see her in Edinburgh.117 The past tense (“made her popular”) makes Freeman seem an author of the fading nineteenth century. Despite the warmer letters pasted in from Sarah Orne Jewett, who did make a literary pilgrimage to Douglas in Edinburgh, her name is spelled as “Jewitt” throughout the scrapbook, suggesting that Douglas was not focused on the women’s network. This is just one of many absences in the archives of women’s transatlanticism. The most striking theme in the initial British reviews is Anglo-­ Saxonism, a nefarious ideology from which scholars today typically distance themselves. When praising Freeman’s Anglo-Saxonism, the British reviewers often worked to claim Freeman as one of their own. Their language, however, betrays concerns about the slightly diminished international literary reputation of Britain. Thus, their responses illustrate a competitive dimension to international reviewing. Other critics found in Freeman’s fiction several subversive themes: religious dissent, political unruliness, and emotional extremity and singularity. By listening to Freeman’s “far-away melody,” a melody not every reader could

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  95 hear, critics and reviewers noted misunderstood or suppressed aspects of their nation. Transatlantic reading is characterized by reinterpretation as well as power struggles. The fury among reviewers over the nature of Freeman’s accomplishment demonstrates for today’s Freeman readers the potency and significance of her characteristic themes of dissent, nonconformity, and solitary singularity. Her work paved the way for Gilman and Wharton as readers likewise grappled with the conflicting tendencies in their modern literature. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, British editions and reviews*

A Humble Romance and Other Stories British Editions A Humble Romance and Other Stories. Series of American Authors. David Douglas, 1890. A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories. Series of American Authors. David Douglas, 1890. A Far Away Melody. Simpkin, 1890. A Humble Romance and Other Stories. Hamilton, 1890. A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories. The English Library Series. Heinemann and Balestier, 1891. A Humble Romance and Other Stories. David Douglas, 1892. A Humble Romance and Other Stories. Ward, Lock, and Bowden, 1893. A Humble Romance and Other Stories. Ward, Lock, and Bowden, 1895. Cinnamon Roses, and Other Stories. Hodder and Stoughton, 1901. A Humble Romance, and A Far-Away Melody. Henry Frowde, 1911 (title stories only). A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories. Foulis Fiction Series, vol. 4. 1922. A Humble Romance and Other Stories. New edition. Foulis Fiction Series. 1923. British Reviews “Literature.” Glasgow Herald. 27 March 1890, 9. “New Novels.” Scots Observer. 26 April 1890, 640. “Novels.” Saturday Review. 10 May 1890, 574–6. “New Books.” Leamington Spa Courier. 24 May 1890, 3.

* Most of these periodicals are on the databases British Periodicals, British Newspapers, British Newspaper Archive, 19thC UK Periodicals, or the Modernist Journals Project. Titles of reviews are listed only if they are different from the title of the book.

96  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Academy, 21 June 1890, 946. “Belles Lettres.” Westminster Review. July 1890, 215–21. W.J. Dawson. “My Study Diary.” Young Woman. 2 December 1892, 27–29.

A New England Nun and Other Stories British Editions Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891 British Reviews “A New Book by Miss Wilkins.” Pall Mall Gazette. 7 May 1891. “American Folk Stories.” Freeman’s Journal (Dublin). 19 May 1891, 5. Hearth and Home. 28 May 1891. Saturday Review, 30 May 1891, 71. L.F. Austen. “Folios and Footlights.” New Review. June 1891, 563–8. Glasgow Herald, 4 June 1891, 4. C.K.S. “Book . . . Gossip.” Penny Illustrated Paper. 6 June 1891. John Barrow Allen, Academy, 13 June 1891, 558–9. “A Contrast in Feminine Fiction.” Speaker, 27 June 1891, 772–3. Murray’s Magazine, July 1891, 142. “Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review, July 1891, 105–11. “Novels of the Week.” Athenaeum, 18 July 1891, 92–4. “The Reader.” The Graphic. 18 July 1891. “The Brown Owl.” Atalanta. 1 August 1891, 729. “Literary Notices.” Manchester Courier. 1 August 1891, 10. Meade, L.T. “The Brown Owl.” Atalanta. 1 September 1891, 790. “Miss Wilkins’s Stories.” Spectator. 3 October 1891, 449–50. [Agnes MacDonnell.] “Mary E. Wilkins, by the Author of ‘Quaker Cousins.’” Bookman. December 1891, 102–3. Rpt. in Marchalonis, ed., Critical Essays, 22–23. “The Ossification of the Will.” Spectator. 2 January 1892, 11–12.

Pembroke British Edition Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894 British Reviews “Novels and Stories.” Glasgow Herald. 17 May 1894, 7. “New Novels.” Scotsman. 21 May 1894, 3.

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  97 “The Library Table.” Globe (London). 28 May 1894, 3. “Literary Notices.” Liverpool Mercury, 30 May 1894. “The Novelist of New England.” St. James’s Gazette. 30 May 1894, 5. “Our Monthly Parcel of Books.” Review of Reviews. June 1894. Athenaeum. 9 June 1894, 739. Times. 16 June 1894, 17. Saturday Review. 23 June 1894, 667–8. Reprinted in Marchalonis, ed. Critical Essays, 32–4. The Speaker. 23 June 1894: 705–6. “Miss Wilkins’s Pembroke.” Spectator. 23 June 1894, 858–9. James Payn. “Our Notebook.” Illustrated London News. 7 July 1894, 2. “New Books.” Birmingham Daily Post. 22 October 1894. “Without Prejudice.” I. Zangwill. Pall Mall Magazine, November 1894, 521–8. W.J. Dawson. “Half-Hours in the Library.” Young Woman. 7 December 1894, 32–33. Idler Interviewer. “A Chat with Conan Doyle.” Idler, January 1895, 340–9. [Stephen Lucius Gwynn.] “Novels of American Life.” Edinburgh Review. April 1898, 386–414.

Notes 1 The term “craze” was coined by a writer for the New York Critic. “English Craze,” Critic (New York), 23 August 1890, Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ed. Jeff Kaylin, http://wilkinsfreeman.info/. This web resource will be cited as JK in the notes to this chapter. I follow Glasser in calling the writer by her married name because she requested this usage. Leah Blatt Glasser, In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). 2 Laurence Hutton, “Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.” Harper’s Weekly, 21 November 1903, 1879–80, reprinted in Critical Essays on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ed. Shirley Marchalonis (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), 46; “Four Stories,” Critic (New York), 29 November 1890, JK; Idler Interviewer, “A Chat with Conan Doyle,” Idler, January 1895, 340–9. 3 L.T. Meade, “The Brown Owl,” Atalanta, 1 September 1891, 790. 4 “Miss Wilkins’s Stories,” review of A New England Nun, Spectator, 3 ­October 1891, 449–50; “A New Book by Miss Wilkins.” Pall Mall Gazette, 7 May 1891. 5 L.F. Austen, “Folios and Footlights,” review of A New England Nun, The New Review, June 1891, 563–8. 6 Shirley Marchalonis, introduction to Critical Essays On Mary Wilkins Freeman, 1–15; Brent Kendrick, ed. The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985). 7 Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-­ American Relations, 1895–1904 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-­ Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and the United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88 no. 4 (March 2002):1315–53.

98  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman 8 Ledger and Luckhurst provide a good overview: Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, “Reading the ‘Fin De Siècle,’” in The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900, ed. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xiii–xxiii. 9 Robert Weisbuch in Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), for example, focuses on mid-century American writers’ “threatened, feisty response” to British contemporaries (27). Weisbuch argues that American influence on British writers increased as the century progressed (30), but he does not address how much women writers contributed to the shift. In Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995), 203–46, Malcolm Bradbury demonstrates how each nation viewed the other through its own ideological concerns. He discusses the growing importance of American novels in fin de siècle Britain, but he does not consider any women writers of the era. 10 See Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer, and Emily B. Todd, “Introduction: Reading Stowe as a Transatlantic Writer,” in Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture, ed. Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer, and Emily B. Todd (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), xi–xxxi; William Stowe, “Transatlantic Subjects,” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 159–70. Whitney Womack Smith’s work exemplifies the focus on reciprocities; she argues that the literary influence between Stowe and Elizabeth Gaskell was mutual: Whitney Womack Smith, “Stowe, Gaskell, and the Woman Reformer,” in Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture, ed. Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer, and Emily B. Todd (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 89–110. Jennifer Cognard-Black names “reciprocities” as her work’s key contribution to transatlanticism: Jennifer Cognard-Black, Narrative in the Professional Age: Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (New York: Routledge, 2004). Patsy Stoneman and Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce with Angela Leighton focus on “dialogism” in women’s interculturalism: Patsy Stoneman and Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce with Angela Leighton, European Intertexts: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005). To emphasize transatlantic cooperation, Margaret McFadden invokes the phrase “golden cables of sympathy,” coined by the Finnish feminist Alli Trygg-Helenius. Margaret H. ­McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism. Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1999. 11 Charles Johnninsgmeier, “The Current State of Freeman Bibliographical and Textual Studies,” ATQ 13 (1999): 173–96. 12 Jacob Blanck, ed. “Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman,” in Bibliography of American Literature, Vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 228. 13 Marlene Springer, “The Death of Edna Pontellier and the Card Catalog,” in Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival, ed. Bernard Koloski (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 131–40. 14 “A Castle in Spain,” Atalanta 1 December 1888, 184; “The Silver Hen,” Atalanta 1 December 1888, 192. 15 The Douglas edition had the larger impact on the craze. The Heinemann and Balestier edition was only authorized to be published outside Britain and its colonies (William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions in English 1841–1955: A Bibliographical History [New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1988], 193). It seems to

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  99 include only A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories. The physical book lists an edition of A Humble Romance and Other Stories in the same series, but the Blanck bibliography does not, and the British Library does not hold such a book. Blanck, “Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman,” says that the Heinemann and Balestier edition is a reprint of the Douglas. 16 Scott Bennett, “David Douglas and the British Publication of W.D. Howells’ Works,” Studies in Bibliography 25 (1972): 107–24. 17 “A Far-Away Melody” falls halfway through the original volume, and its promotion to a title story might be coincidental. 18 The timing of publication is based on Blanck, “Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.” 19 “English Craze.” 20 “Four Stories.” 21 “Literary Miscellany,” Literary News (New York), January 1891, 30, quoted in Kendrick, ed., The Infant Sphinx, 441n58. 22 In the Queen (Kendrick, ed. Infant Sphinx, 458n1), the Bookman, Atalanta, and The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times. 23 My sources on the alleged plagiarism case are the following: “Occasional Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, 2 April 1891; “Literary Notes, News, and Echoes,” Pall Mall Gazette, 4 April 1891; “One of Those Facts Which Nobody Can Explain,” Pall Mall Gazette, 4 June 1891; Katharine Hill, “Mary E. Wilkins at Home,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, July 1900, JK. 24 “Sales of Books During the Month,” Bookman, October 1891, 31. 25 Dean Baldwin, “The Tardy Evolution of the British Short Story,” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (1993): 23–33; David Malcolm, The British and Irish Short Story Handbook (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–33; Winnie Chan, The Economy of Short Stories in British Periodicals of the 1890s (New York: Routledge, 2007). The periodicals at the time regularly cited Freeman as an example of a great short story writer, one whose story collections were selling well and winning critical acclaim. See “Behind a Bookseller’s Counter,” Bookman, November 1891, 66; “Novels of the Week,” Athenaeum, 12 November 1892, 660–2. 26 Elaine Showalter, “English Fruits and Yankee Turnips: A Literary Banquet” (Plenary presented at Transatlantic Women Conference: Nineteenth-­ Century American Women Writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe, University of Oxford, July 2008). 27 “Literary and Social,” Woman’s Herald, 22 February 1894, 117–8; Review of “Down the Village Street” by Christopher Hare, Pall Mall Gazette, 29 October 1895; Review of “Irish Idylls” by Jane Barlow, Athenaeum, 14 January 1893, 49–50. See also “The Young Author’s Page,” Bookman, September 1896 and October 1896, in which young authors are advised to use Miss Mary Wilkins as one’s guide for “this” type of story, the type that portrays “eccentric, cross-grained, difficult elderly heroines” (October 1896, 25). Other writers compared to Freeman were Mabel Quiller Couch, E. Boyd-Bayly, Ida Lemon, Mrs. Murray Hickson, Mrs. Antrobus, and Jeanette Marks: “Some Western Folk,” Academy, 4 December 1897, 483; Review of A Bit of Wool by E. Boyd-Bayly, Bookman, September 1899, 170; Review of A Pair of Lovers and Other Stories, by Ida Lemon, Athenaeum, 13 May 1893, 602; Advertisement for The Chronicles of Teddy’s Village, by Mrs. Murray Hickson, Athenaeum, 16 September 1899, 373; H.B. Marriott Watson, “Fiction in 1902,” review of The Wine of Finvarra, by Mrs. Antrobus, Pall Mall Magazine, January 1903, 131–5; Review of Through Welsh Doorways, by Jeanette Marks, Academy, 12 November 1910, 470.

100  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman 28 Ilse Frapan, Bookman, April 1892, 16–17; R. Nisbet Bain, “Contemporary Scandinavian Belles-Lettres,” Cosmopolis, October 1897, 66–79. 29 See, for example, “Fiction,” Review of Tales of New England by Sarah Orne Jewett, Speaker, 26 August 1893, 222–3. Reviewers soon noted that Jewett was distinguishing herself by writing stories that were more subtle and quiet than those of Wilkins. See, for example, Review of The Country of the Pointed Firs, Academy, 13 March 1897, 301. 30 See, for example, James Ashcroft Noble, “New Novels,” Review of Maureen’s Fairing and Other Stories by Jane Barlow, Academy, 3 August 1895, 87–88; Review of From the Broad Acres by J.S. Fletcher, Academy, 1 July 1899, 16; Review of The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky by James Lane Allen, Speaker, 2 June 1900, 256–7; Review of The Passion of Mahael by Lilian Bowen-Rowlands, Saturday Review, 4 October 1902, 432; 31 Tuley Francis Huntington, Letter to the Editors, Critic 13 June 1896, JK. 32 Sylvia Townsend Warner, “Item, One Empty House” (1966), in Collected Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Marchalonis, 118–22. 33 Charles Johanningsmeier argues that periodical publication was the more powerful. “The Current State of Freeman Bibliographical and Textual Studies.” Indeed, in addition to Harper’s own periodical publication, circumstantial evidence exists that her work appeared elsewhere in the 1880s: the American critic Laurence Hutton remembers first encountering her work in Scottish weeklies. Laurence Hutton, “Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,” Harper’s Weekly 21 November 1903, 1879–80, reprinted in Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Marchalonis, 45–46. 34 Press about the plagiarism case supports the point. A Pall Mall Gazette journalist averred that the plot was used in a story “written a year ago or more by Miss Wilkins, in her ‘Humble Romance’” but two days later apologized and noted that the story was published in Harper’s Magazine in June 1884. Scornfully, the writer remarked, “The English critics who have lately been glorying in their ‘discovery’ of Miss Wilkins have, therefore, taken their time over it”: “Occasional Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, 2 April 1891; “Literary Notes, News, and Echoes,” Pall Mall Gazette, 4 April 1891. 35 “Our Library Table,” Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 14 May 1890. 36 “City Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, March 1891. 37 “Miss Wilkins’s Stories,” review of A New England Nun and Other Stories, Spectator, 3 October 1891, 449–50. 38 “Personal Notes,” Woman’s Herald, 26 October 1893. 39 Review of Pembroke, Times, 16 June 1894, 17. 40 “Miss Wilkins’s ‘Pembroke,’” Spectator, 23 June 1894, 858–9. 41 “The Profession of Literature in America,” Times, 16 August 1895, 3. 42 Review of Jane Field, Academy, 4 February 1893, 102. 43 “Notes,” Critic, 16 January 1897, JK. 44 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, A Humble Romance and Other Stories, Series of American Authors(Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890), v. Further references are cited in the text. 45 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (1999; Harvard University Press, 2004), 35–36. 46 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman to Edith O’Dell Black, 16 December 1928, in The Infant Sphinx, 427–8. 47 For Douglas’s ideas about payment, see David Douglas Scrapbook Part I, National Library of Scotland, Acc. 12309. For historical currency values, see National Archives (UK), www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/. For Ward and Lock payment, see Freeman to David Douglas, 17 May 1893, David Douglas Scrapbook Part 4, p. 621, Acc. 12309, National Library of Scotland. Harper and Brothers England sold 3,800 copies of Freeman’s

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  101 A New England Nun and Other Stories by 1901 and as her American publisher would have followed through with their agreed royalty rate: Harper & Brothers Records, English Royalty Ledgers, Series 5, Volume 92, 30 June 1901–1930 June 1908; Volume 96 1908–1913; Volume 67 1913–1920, Columbia University, City of New York. 48 Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 175–8; Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons,” 1320. 49 William Dean Howells, “The Editor’s Study,” Harper’s Monthly, September 1887, 639–40, reprinted in Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Marchalonis, 19. 50 [Agnes MacDonnell], “Mary E. Wilkins, by the Author of “Quaker Cousins,” review of A New England Nun and Other Stories, Bookman, 1 (December 1891), 102–3, reprinted in Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Marchalonis, 22. Further references are to the Critical Essays edition and will be cited in the text. 51 Freeman to Florence E. Bate, 19 December 1901, The Infant Sphinx, ed. Kendrick, 255–6. 52 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “The Happy Day,” McClure’s Magazine 21 no. 1 (May 1903). JK. 53 Historically, scholars have associated local color with challenges to national coherence. Recent critics argue about whether local color paradoxically reasserts fantasies of national coherence, since the writing treats the regions as kernels of the nation’s white, native virtue. See Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 240–66. An interesting debate has occurred around Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-Normanism in the fiction of Freeman’s contemporary Sarah Orne Jewett. See Sandra Zagarell, “Country’s Portrayal of Community and the Exclusion of Difference,” New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, ed. June Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39–60; Jacqueline Shea Murphy, “Replacing Regionalism: Abenaki Tales and ‘Jewett’s’ Coastal Maine,” American Literary History 10, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 664–90; Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). This scholarship illustrates that imagined kinship with England served many literary purposes, not a single ideological program. 54 “American Folk Stories,” review of A New England Nun and Other Stories, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 19 May 1891, 5. 55 Edward Garnett, “An Appreciation,” Academy, 8 March 1902, 250–1. 56 Walter Besant, “The Short Story in America,” Critic 14 October 1893, reprinted from the London Daily News. JK. 57 Review of Pembroke, Critic, 21 July 1894, 36–37, reprinted in Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Marchalonis, 34–35; Mary Moss, “Some Representative American Story Tellers,” Bookman (New York), 24 September 1906. JK. 58 Susman argues that nineteenth-century Americans admired the Puritans for their brave belief in religious freedom, while fin-de-siecle Americans used “Puritanism” as a code word for genteel literature and sexual repression: Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984). Barnstone et al. revise Susman’s thesis by tracing convergences between Puritanism and modernism, yet none of the essays consider Puritanism an urgent political threat: Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley, ed. The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997).

102  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman 59 J.P. Parry, “Nonconformity, Clericalism and ‘Englishness’: The United Kingdom,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 152–80. 60 Parry, “Nonconformity, Clericalism and ‘Englishness’”; Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America 1790–1865 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006); Rowen Strong, Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernising Society (Oxford University Press, 2002). 61 Paul Giles, Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 170. 62 Walter E. Houghton, ed. Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals Vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 1988). 63 Hutton, “Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,” 46; Diana Barsham, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meaning of Masculinity (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2000). 64 “The Ossification of the Will,” Spectator, 2 January 1892, 11–12. Further references are cited in the text. 65 Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics (London: Grant Richards, 1902), 186–98. 66 “Miss Wilkins’s ‘Pembroke,’” Spectator, 23 June 1894, 858–9. Further references cited in the text. 67 A marked file once identifying Spectator contributors has been reported lost by http://victorianresearch.org/libraries.html#periodicals. 68 Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900. CD. 69 Houghton, ed. Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals Vol. 1, 544. [­Stephen Lucius Gwynn], “Novels of American Life,” Edinburgh Review, April 1898, 386–414. The review of Pembroke is reprinted in Marchalonis, ed. Critical Essays, 35–39. Page references in the notes and text are to the Edinburgh Review. 70 Ann Matheson, “Scottish Periodicals,” Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, Vol. 2, ed. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (New York: MLA, 1989), 98–109. 71 Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 151. 72 Strong, Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, 29. 73 Susan Manning, The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 74 “Literature,” review of A Humble Romance and Other Tales [sic], Glasgow Herald, 27 March 1890, 9; Review of A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories, Scots Observer, 26 April 1890, 640. 75 Freeman is often identified with Puritanism, but this is a sticking point among Freeman scholars. Perry D. Westbrook declares that “[a]mong American writers Freeman is the supreme analyst of the Puritan will in its constructive strengths, in its aberrations, and in its decadence into mere whim and stubbornness”: Perry D. Westbrook, Mary Wilkins Freeman, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), 62. Susan Allen Toth’s influential feminist essay argues for self-fulfillment rather than self-denial in Freeman: “Defiant Light: A Positive View of Mary Wilkins Freeman,” in Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Marchalonis, 123–31. Gregg Camfield combines the foci, treating Freeman as a humorist who pokes fun at both Calvinism and Social Darwinism in their joint insistence on competitive conflict as refining fire: Gregg Camfield, “‘I Never Saw Anything at Once

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  103 So Pathetic and Funny’: Humor in the Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman,” American Transcendental Quarterly 13, no. 3 (September 1999): 215–31. 76 The story is not anthologized in the four most common collections: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, A Mary Wilkins Freeman Reader, ed. Mary R. ­Reichardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, A New England Nun and Other Stories, ed. Sandra Zagarell (New York: Penguin, 2000), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ‘The Revolt of “Mother”’ and Other Stories (New York: Dover Thrift, 2003); Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Selected Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ed. Marjorie Pryse (New York: Norton, 1983). 77 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “A Far-Away Melody,” in A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories, Series of American Authors (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890), 16–17. Further references are cited in the text. 78 Toth, “Defiant Light.” 79 “Miscellaneous Stories,” Graphic, 17 May 1890. See also “A New Book by Miss Wilkins,” Pall Mall Gazette, 7 May 1891. 80 Doris J. Turkes, “Must Age Equal Failure?: Sociology Looks at Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Old Women,” ATQ 13, no. 3 (Sept. 1999): 197–215. 81 “Novels.” review of A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories; in its reviews of Pembroke and “Doc” Gordon, the Saturday Review continued its satirical comments about women characters’ obsession with dress, spinsters, and cats. 82 “Fiction,” review of Pembroke, Speaker, 23 June 1894, 705–6. 83 Glasser, In a Closet Hidden, 123. 84 Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Marysa Demoor, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katharine Mansfield, 1870– 1920 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000). 85 The Woman’s Herald was founded in 1888 as the Women’s Penny Paper; it became the Woman’s Herald in 1891 and The Woman’s Signal by 1896. I cite articles to the title under which they are indexed, but when discussing the magazine in general, I follow Youngkin in calling it the Woman’s Herald. Molly Youngkin, Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). 86 Youngkin, Feminist Realism, 7. 87 Youngkin, Feminist Realism, 7, 37. 88 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” in A Mary Wilkins Freeman Reader, ed. Reichardt, 133. 89 Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Less Work for ‘Mother’: Rural Readers, Farm Papers, and the Makeover of ‘The Revolt of “Mother,”’” Legacy 26, no. 1 (2009): 119–49. 90 “Notes and News,” Academy, 24 April 1897, 451–3. 91 See, for example, Suzanne Juhasz, ed. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 92 See advertisement for “The Lily Series,” The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 February 1875, 7. 93 Melissa Homestead, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 94 “Literary Gossip,” Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 24 April 1894, 7; A.K.H.B. “Oliver Wendell Holmes,” Longman’s Magazine, August 1896, 344–56. 95 Albert D. Vandam, “Women Worth Knowing I—Mary E. Wilkins,” Atalanta, 1 November 1891, 94–96; “Personal Notes,” Woman’s Herald, 26

104  Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman October 1893; “Mary Wilkins at Home,” Woman’s Signal, 22 February 1894, 117–8; “Miss Mary E. Wilkins,” Woman at Home, date unknown on 19th-c UK Periodicals database, 228. Based on internal evidence and the fact that the magazine began in 1893, I would date this final piece to that year. 96 “Mary Wilkins At Home,” 118. 97 Susan Koppelman, “Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman,” in Two Friends, and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers (New York: Meridian, 1994), 125. 98 Frances Willard, “The Spinster’s Roll of Honour,” Woman’s Signal, 20 February 1896. 99 “Miss Mary E. Wilkins,” 228. 100 A letter from Freeman to her New York friend Kate Upson Clark, a journalist, describes Wilkins’s rooms in very similar terms, suggesting that the Woman at Home lifted details from Kate Upson Clark’s similar piece, which appeared in the US publication The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1892. See Freeman to Clark, before August 1893, in Kendrick, ed., The Infant Sphinx, 140; Clark, “Literary Women in Their Homes II—Mary Eleanor Wilkins,” Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1892, JK. Alternatively, The Woman at Home wrote Freeman directly and received a similar reply. The culture of reprinting meant that supportive female networks inevitably linked both sides of the Atlantic, not just through cables of sympathy, but also a certain amount of pilfering. 101 See, for example, Garvey, “Less Work for ‘Mother’”; Michael Grimwood, “Architecture and Autobiography in ‘The Revolt of “Mother,”’” American Literary Realism 40, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 66–82. 102 “How to Form and Keep Up Interest in a Branch of the B.W.T.A.” Woman’s Signal, 31 October 1895, 285. 103 “The Brown Owl,” Atalanta, 1 August 1891, 729. 104 Critics who treat Freeman as a New Woman writer include the following: Heather Kirk Thomas, “‘It’s Your Father’s Way’: The Father-Daughter Narrative and Female Development in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke,” Studies in the Novel 29 (1997): 26–39; June Howard, Publishing the Family (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 158–212. 105 I. Zangwill, “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine, November 1894, 528. 106 “Our Literary Guild,” Hearth and Home, 21 September 1893, 640. 107 Frances E. Ashwell, “The Feminine Novel,” Woman’s Signal, 23 August 1894, 125. 108 “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade,” Bookman, July 1894, 105. 109 Monika Elbert, “The Displacement of Desire: Consumerism and Fetishism in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Fiction,” Legacy 19, no. 2 (2002): 192–215. 110 “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade,” Bookman, July 1896, 104; “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade,” Bookman, November 1897, 30–31; “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade,” Bookman, December 1897, 59–60; “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade,” Bookman, August 1898, 120–1; “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade,” Bookman, November 1900, 38–9; “Wholesale Reports of the Book-Selling Trade,” Bookman, June 1901, 72–74. 111 Harper Brothers Records, English Royalty Ledgers, Series 5, Volume 92 June 30, 1901–June 30, 1908; Volume 96 1908–1913; Volume 67 1913– 1920. Harper Brothers Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

Readings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman  105 12 Marchalonis, introduction. 1 113 Review of The Portion of Labour, Athenaeum, 4 January 1902, 12; review of The Portion of Labour, Academy, 18 January, 1902, 53–54; “Fiction,” review of The Portion of Labour, Speaker, 15 February 1902, 568–9; “Six Months of American Literature,” review of The Portion of Labour, Saturday Review, 29 March 1902, 405–6. 114 R.C.T., review of By the Light of the Soul, Dublin Review, January 1907, 422–4. 115 Sydney Bufkin, “Gender, Genre, and Public Citizenship in the Reception of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Portion of Labor” (Conference Paper, Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Conference, Denver, October 2012). 116 Todd and Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions in English 1841– 1955, 465. 117 David Douglas Scrapbook, Part 4, 21. National Library of Scotland. Manuscript. Acc. 12309.

4 Eyes to See Them British Responses to Native Americans in the Works of Helen Hunt Jackson and Zitkala-Ša White and Native women took a leading role in alerting white audiences to the wrongs done to Native Americans, and they had a small but potent following in Great Britain.1 “The wrongs of the Indian have never been righted,” wrote the Leicester Chronicle upon the grisly occasion of the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889.2 On April 22 of that year, 50,000 settlers rushed into two million acres formerly set aside for numerous Indian tribes who had been forced into that territory from their homelands in the American South, Eastern seaboard, and Great Plains. Bemoaning the lack of response to Ramona, the 1884 novel by “the late, lamented” Mrs. Jackson, the Leicester Liberal paper editorialized, “Neither in Britain nor in the States have there been eyes to see, or hearts to understand them” (8). The paper, then, expressed sympathy for the Native American, and it cast about for an international spokesperson for the Native cause, finding only a partial solution in the works of white writer Helen Hunt Jackson.3 It condemned the Land Rush not as a symptom of American brashness but of modern times everywhere: the settlers are “strictly in keeping with the spirit and principle of the enterprise and push practiced by many people in our day” (8). The article illustrates the decreasing power of sympathy to move people to indignation about Native Americans during the 1880s, 1890s, and early decades of the twentieth century. In its criticism of the spirit of enterprise, it also expressed disagreement with US imperialist policies toward Indians without disavowing their connection to British imperialist policies or modernization and modernity within the United Kingdom. As such, the article is a rare find. To express sympathy for the Native American and to criticize either the United States or Great Britain for destroying or denigrating Native cultures was to articulate anti-imperialism. As Bernard Porter writes, British critics of empire were in a minority among the general clamor for imperial dominance at the end of the century. They were not a unified front, rarely offering a holistic critique of empire and were, Porter writes, by no means out-and-out anti-imperialists: in the sense of condemning every kind of domination of one people over others, calling for imperial withdrawal in all circumstances, and abjuring every one

Eyes to See Them  107 of the attitudes that are commonly associated with imperialism, like the prejudice that their cultures were in some ways superior to others.4 From early in the century, organizations such as the Aborigine Protection Society and the Anti-Slavery Society objected to imperialism on humanitarian grounds, arguing that state or private involvement in the lands of less civilized peoples led to cruel treatment and abuse. Yet, very few members of these organizations disputed the universal validity of European standards of civilization or conceded that Natives might be better off developing their own societies.5 They were proud of their country’s imperial standing and encouraged its moderation by Christian charity and justice. A handful of Liberal politicians formed a second group of critics of empire, politicians like Richard Cobden from the Manchester area, who objected to British imperial ventures on the grounds of expense, arguing that the money was better spent improving the lives of British citizens at home, and that an increase in the franchise should result in voters objecting to spending monies in this way. This sentiment of the Liberal Party rarely considered empire from the point of view of Native people.6 Later in the century, some members of Parliament associated with Labour or the Liberals, following J.A. Hobson and Ramsay MacDonald, developed a critique of empire in line with socialism, arguing that empire arose because of a surplus of labor and capital and led to the exploitation of less civilized races, much as capitalism at home exploited workers.7 After certain debacles like the Jameson Raid of 1895, which pointed to a connection between financial capitalists and imperialism, the death of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885, or the controversial Boer War of 1899–1902, there was increasing feeling among Britons that imperialism risked humiliation and entailed uncomfortable obligations.8 Increasingly, the question became not whether to be for or against empire but what actions to take toward people who were already subjugated by and changed by British, European, or US American private enterprise or state rule. Still, by the end of the century, people like Edmund Dene Morel, Mary Kingsley, and Catherine Impey were making theoretical inroads into a sympathetic understanding of colonized people and conceding to some tenets of cultural relativism.9 This new knowledge, however, was not yet a rival way of thinking to the Victorians’ own; according to Porter, “they were too diffuse and tentative—a few discordant notes scattered about the score which might jar a little on the ear.”10 The predominant mode by which literature expressed discordant notes in the early to mid-nineteenth century was sympathy. Many of the responses to Helen Hunt Jackson, Zitkala-Ša, and other pro-Native or Native writers and activists draw on this discourse. Sympathy as a cultural practice often works to consolidate the power of the sympathizer rather

108  Eyes to See Them than simply enlist support for the victimized other. British sympathy for the Native American might seem especially suspect. According to Rachel McCoppin, British commiseration with the Native American began only after the American Revolution, was accompanied by anti-American sentiments about the brash young nation, and rarely resulted in a similar critique of British imperial policy.11 Still, as Kate Flint argues, sympathy has the power to disturb: “the sentimental is not invariably a safe and reassuring space” even for the armchair critic observing Native Americans and Indian policy from Britain.12 By the 1880s, as we shall see, sympathy gave way, though, to other modes of advocacy. By the 1880s, the taste for local color and exotic renderings of cultural difference in both the United States and Britain was well developed, as we have seen in the last chapter on the flattering response to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s self-consciously “New England” fiction. Most scholars of Helen Hunt Jackson and Zitkala-Ša argue that their work inevitably capitalized on and was read as part of this transnational craze for local color.13 Local color, like sympathy, has the power to disturb readers, for it plunges readers into disorienting and often sordid evocations of cultural difference. Christine Holbo has gone farther than most scholars in arguing that Jackson changed her aesthetic between writing A Century of Dishonor and Ramona. The earlier volume followed from what Holbo calls “a distinct philosophical anthropology.”14 By explaining how the Cherokees printed their own newspaper, and the Nez Percés remained prosperous farmers despite being moved from place to place, Jackson demonstrated that Indians were not permanently “primitive” people but “participants in the material and historical civilization of humankind” (246). In the popular sentimental novel that followed Jackson’s nonfictional exposé, Jackson adopted a varied aesthetic, indexing a shift in the late nineteenth-century American and British reading publics. While earlier editors valued moral guardianship on the part of their contributors, newer editors “encouraged cosmopolitan modes of representation that emphasized multiple perspectives and refrained from expressing moral judgment” (245). Without being necessarily “liberatory or resistant” (245), this modern perspectivalism cultivated a fleeting taste among readers for tales of suffering and oppression. This distracted yet interested gaze, as Holbo characterizes it, also informs how the British press responded to all news about Native Americans, whether journalists were reporting on oral tales among the Winnemucca, Native visits to Great Britain, exhibitions involving Indians at the Chicago World’s Fair, first-hand reports of the Ghost Dance, the armed resistance at Wounded Knee Creek, or Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends (1901). The British referred to all issues regarding Native Americans as “America’s Indian Problem,” a turn of phrase also used by Zitkala-Ša herself in her article “America’s Indian Problem,” first published in her second book, American Indian Stories (1921).15 Mark Rifkin has recently noted

Eyes to See Them  109 the ideological work typically done by this turn of phrase, in which settler sovereignty is normalized by placing Native peoples in a state of exception. He also criticizes recent transnational scholarship on Indians for reinstating this ideological work, for creating a “Transatlantic Indian Problem,” in which scholars suggest that Britons interacted with Natives primarily, or only, by consuming images of them.16 It should be remembered at this juncture that Britons contributed to westward expansion and American government policy toward Natives in direct ways. British tourists in the thousands visited the tourist locations in Southern California associated with Jackson’s primarily fictional characters Ramona and Alessandro; some of them visited boarding schools established for Native children and reported back to the British press with glowing tributes about their success.17 As Rifkin notes, Britons supplied 22 percent of American capital formation during the early twentieth century; British aristocrats participated in the East Coast American clubs that, as Christine Bold has demonstrated, transformed the American West into a national icon.18 Ordinary Britons were emigrants as well as tourists, and nearly four million of them emigrated to the United States before 1941, excluding arrivals from Ireland.19 The nascent Native activism growing in the United States, including that by leading Native American women, received little notice in the British press. 20 The works of Native women writers like the Paiute Sarah Winnemucca or the Muscogee (Creek) S. Alice Callahan were not reviewed, even though Winnemucca’s tribe, the Paiutes, were well known, and Winnemucca’s activism and notoriety meant there were several newspaper articles written by or about her throughout the United States. 21 I have not been able to locate any reprintings of the American newspaper articles about her in the British press. While reports of the traditional beliefs of the Winnemucca were frequent, only one report surfaces about Winnemucca herself, and this is a frequently reprinted short piece about how Elizabeth Peabody had strangely chosen to spend all her time with an “untutored Indian woman,” even though Mrs. Peabody is surrounded by “intellectual friends of both sexes.”22 Ramona (1884), designed to be a popular vehicle for the Indian cause, and hence more likely to receive notice, did not sell very well in Britain. Reviewers of that novel and Jackson’s nonfiction exposé of government treatment of Indians, A Century of Dishonour, generally held both Jackson and her subject matter at arm’s length. They admired her extensive research, recognized the serious and scholarly abilities of this mere female poet and novelist, admired her artistry, and thrilled at the exotic Western landscape of the novel. Yet, rather like Jackson herself, they considered atrocities against Indians to be a primarily American concern. The only shadings of disagreement with this consensus are difficult to extract from the anodyne. By the early twentieth century, sympathy for Native Americans and support for their assimilation to Western culture had to give way in light

110  Eyes to See Them of British knowledge of Native American armed resistance at the Battle of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee Creek. There was growing sense among Native American activists that their survival as a people relied not only on literature that articulates the wrongs done against them, on social criticism aimed at white audiences, but also on literature that values tribal stories that exist apart from white culture. The travels of Yankton Sioux Zitkala-Ša and her book volume Old Indian Legends were reviewed equivocally.23 Nevertheless, the glimmering of respect for Native Americans’ ability to resist and increasing interest in traditional Native stories suggest that fleetingly, there may have been British hearts to understand as well as eyes to see Native Americans.

The British Response to A Century of Dishonour 24 Helen Hunt Jackson was in a similar position vis-à-vis Native Americans to that of her British reviewers, that is, she was largely separated from them by social class, ethnicity, and geographical location. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts and not personally acquainted with any Native Americans, Jackson was moved in 1879 after hearing Ponca Chief Standing Bear speak to publicize the forcible removal of his tribe from Dakota Territory to Indian Territory. After months of research, Jackson produced A Century of Dishonour to convince the US government and population to honor former treaties with Indian nations, enable Indians to keep the land they were currently occupying, and grant Indians some rights before the US law, including (although the text is ambiguous on this count) citizenship. After Jackson finished writing the book, she rested from her labor by touring through Europe for about four months.25 Her presence in London was announced in a “Literary Gossip” column in the Athenaeum that might well be the first British reference to Jackson by name rather than the pseudonyms under which she had published her poetry and fiction (H.H. and Saxe Holm). Born earlier than most of the authors featured in this book, Jackson operated under an older model of female authorship in which the illusion of modesty and reclusiveness was maintained.26 The “Literary Gossip” column in the Athenaeum mentioned that Mrs. Jackson had just finished A Century of Dishonour, which was “relating to the sufferings of the aborigines under the policy and agents of the United States,” and enthuses that “[a] book on this subject from the pen of ‘H.H.’ ought to be of general interest as well as of special importance.”27 In an obituary, also in the Athenaeum, it was said that the only book of hers for which she sought a British republication was A Century of Dishonour. She hoped that it “might excite comments that might have some effect upon her countrymen,”28 expecting that British outrage would have a large effect upon the Americans, as did the British outrage over Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Yet although the British

Eyes to See Them  111 were outraged over the American lynching of African Americans, as evidenced by their warm response to Ida B. Wells’s tours of Europe in 1893 and 1894, Jackson’s A Century of Dishonour of 12 years earlier did not elicit such a reaction.29 The book was indeed republished in Britain by the esteemed publisher Chatto and Windus, who used the American sheets, a mere month after the book appeared in New York in January 1881. Like the American edition, it appeared under her pseudonym, “H.H.,” with a preface by Reverend Henry B. Whipple, the Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, and an introduction by President Julius H. Seelye of Amherst College. She had left the negotiations for the British reprinting up to her American publisher.30 Her decision to publish the book under her usual synonym stemmed from her political caution. Since her late first husband and living sister-in-law were not in sympathy with her Indian reform work, and she did not want to be accused of taking the poetical view of the Indian situation, she wanted to remove the focus from herself.31 The British edition was advertised on the pages of the Athenaeum and the Academy. Three reviews followed slowly. The first to appear was published in April 1881 in the periodical of the Aborigines Protection Society, the Aborigines’ Friend. The review was brief and flattering, supporting the idea that the American Indian should be led up to the rights of full citizenship by being protected in his ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness’ and thus gradually enabled to realise that he has an individual stake in the prosperity of the American nation.32 Like Jackson herself, the paper argued that applying American political values to the American Indian would dramatically improve their condition and legal standing. The view appeared alongside analyses of the extermination of aborigines in Queensland and a piece contending that the Native populations of the Transvaal and its frontiers need security against aggression and slavery, despite Dutch Boer claims that they did not endanger the Natives in these ways.33 The Aborigines’ Friend review might well sound assimilationist, but its words were progressive for its time. Among the major literary periodicals and important newspapers, A Century of Dishonour received only two reviews, one from the Saturday Review and one from the Westminster Review, which was usually a leading radical voice. 34 Both reviewers expressed outrage at American treatment of Indians, declared the accuracy of H.H.’s facts, and fully accepted the authority of H.H., who was known to be a woman, to be making claims for the universality of human rights and the cruel aporias of US law. In fact, it was not surprising for Victorian audiences to see a woman take the lead on Native rights. The Westminster Review

112  Eyes to See Them approved of the fact that the book was “inspired by the sympathetic sex of its authoress” (272). But both reviewers managed to attribute the cruelty of US treatment of Indians to the nation’s status as a republic, an argument that exonerated Britain itself. In this, they followed the lead of the preface by Reverend Henry B. Whipple rather than any impulses in Jackson’s text itself. The Saturday Review recommended the volume highly for telling a dark chapter in the history of a great nation. The dealings with Indians are “redeemed by no single act of generosity, no single instance of good faith firmly kept,” representing “democracy in the blackest . . . colours” (572). If the perpetrators were to be charged before “even Italian juries,” thousands of American citizens would be executed as deliberate torturers and murderers of defenseless women and children, thousands more as thieves and swindlers (572). The Westminster Review sounded worried primarily about the financial cost of settlements with Indian tribes, as it estimates that more than £100,000,000 Sterling has been spent by a nation of 50,000,000 governing the so-called “savages” numbering never more than 300,000, eye-grabbing figures the monthly repeated in a report contrasting administrative progress in Canada in an October 1881 article, “India and Our Colonial Empire.”35 Clearly, the Westminster Review fell under Richard Cobden’s type of criticism of empire, focusing solely on the costs to the public purse. Jackson’s purpose in detailing the amount of money the US government promised to each of the Indian tribes was not to bemoan the costliness of the exercise but illustrate how inadequately the money compensated for the Indians’ loss. The Saturday Review closed its review with a homage to Canada: And let it be remembered that, in the midst of their systematic treachery, falsehood, and cruelty throughout their century of unrivalled dishonour, the American nation and the American government have had before them a bright example of conduct exactly reversing their own. It is impossible to plead necessity; for Canada has steadily kept faith with those towards whom America has steadily broken it; and the result is as decisive on the question of policy as it is conclusive on the point of honour. (572) The Westminster Review similarly remarked that Jackson’s book makes frequent pointed allusions to the far greater success of the treatment of Indians by the English in Canada, an emphasis that does not appear in Jackson’s text. Jackson’s one mention of Canada (which she calls “that sanctuary of refuge for the Indian as well as for the slave”) is that Sitting Bull escaped to Canada after the military campaign of 1876 and 1877 (he surrendered to the United States in July 1881 when Jackson’s book was already out).36 The Westminster Review claimed that the Indians of Canada are “‘subjects of the Queen’—they enjoy rights which are denied to the

Eyes to See Them  113 Indians further South, because the citizenship of the United States is too uniform and inelastic to allow of their admission within its pale” (272). In Reverend Whipple’s preface, Whipple proclaims that Canada treated its Indians much better than the Americans did: All this while Canada has had no Indian wars. Our Government has expended for the Indians a hundred dollars to their one. They recognize, as we do, that the Indian has a possessory right to the soil. They purchase this right, as we do, by treaty; but their treaties are made with the Indian subjects of Her Majesty. They set apart a permanent reservation for them; they seldom remove the Indians; they select agents of high character, who receive their appointments for life; they make fewer promises, but they fulfil them; they give the Indians Christian missions, which have the hearty support of Christian people, and all their efforts are toward self-help and civilization.37 Coming from Minnesota, with a large Native population that mixed with Natives across the Canadian border, Reverend Whipple was an authoritative voice on the matter of Canadian and American Indian relations and an appropriate person for Jackson to enlist to her cause.38 He was a leading protector of the Sioux, having established a mission among the Sioux and protected Sioux prisoners from execution from the government after the Santee Sioux uprising.39 When requesting that he write the preface, Jackson requested specifically “a brief preface, a sort of benediction from you,” which would be “of great value in recommending the book to a large circle of readers.”40 Unbeknownst to Jackson, however, Whipple’s preface did more than serve as a benediction to her cause in Britain: it co-opted her book into a larger argument about the superiority of British and Canadian policies toward indigenous populations. It is likely that neither Whipple nor Jackson anticipated A Century of Dishonour being used in this way. No letter in the collected The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885 reveals Jackson’s response to Whipple’s preface, but her deferential attitude toward male benefactors suggests that she probably accepted Whipple’s preface without a qualm. As Kate Flint argues, “the dominant and frequently reiterated British viewpoint was that [the position of Canadian Indians] was vastly preferable to that of Indians on lands that had passed from British jurisdiction.”41 Indeed, Douglas Owram’s analysis of Canadian responses to US Indian policy argues that the Canadian press concurred with the British establishment. Canadian journalists developed a “stereotype” of the US West as lawless and brutal that dated back to the confidence born with the founding of the Dominion of Canada in 1867 and that lost only a little force after Métis and Native rebellions began in the Canadian West in the 1880s.42 Canadians contrasted their own humane treatment of Natives to the warlike policies of their brash, intemperate southern neighbor, thus reinforcing national stereotypes. Owram and Jill St. Germain argue

114  Eyes to See Them that both the United States and Canada were similarly ethnocentric in their dealings with their indigenous populations.43 The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which consulted with survivors of the residential schools for Aboriginal children, concluded that the residential schools were a tool of cultural genocide, without any discussion of the relative brutality of the Canadian policies.44 Such comparative responses that absolve Britain itself do conservative cultural work. They were widespread in the 1880s, yet under threat, as indigenous people in Canada and elsewhere in the British Empire were resisting the British rule. The scant reaction to Jackson’s A Century of Dishonour suggests that British journalists recognized a close similarity between the Canadian and American treatment of Indians that needed to be disavowed.

British Reviews of Ramona Ramona did not create the stir in Britain either among reviewers or among popular audiences that Jackson had hoped for. Jackson was disappointed with the paltry response to A Century of Dishonour and decided to write a crowd-pleasing novel to inspire a wide number of people to sympathize with Indians. In Ramona, the half-Scottish, half-Native heroine, Ramona, forsakes her wealthy Mexican upbringing to marry a Luiseño Indian, Alessandro, and join him in his struggles against encroaching Anglo settlers. Like the Nez Percés, Alessandro and Ramona are forced to move several times and witness rough Americans move in to their adobe house. Their infant daughter dies when an American government doctor refuses to treat her. Alessandro suffers bouts of insanity that result in him being shot by an American newcomer for horse stealing. For Ramona, there is a happier denouement, as she is discovered by her foster brother Felipe and they sell his family’s estate and move to Mexico, where mixed race and non-Anglo people can be ushered out of the United States. As critics have argued, the novel is part of a transnational tradition of anti-imperialist and feminist activism.45 Despite strong US popularity (21,000 copies sold in 1885, 74,000 copies sold by 1900), the novel attracted critical and popular attention primarily for its love story and vivid evocation of Californio life and beautiful scenery.46 Currently, neither Macmillan nor Sampson Low has preserved circulation figures, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the novel did not create the stir and impact it did in the United States. It was published two weeks after the US publication date of November 1884 by the major publisher of Macmillan.47 The Macmillan edition was expensive at 12 shillings, but one reviewer complained that it was “rather closely printed,” and no illustrated edition appeared in Britain until 1914, when one merely reprinted the American illustrations by Henry Sandham.48 This is in contrast to the novel’s material performances in the United States, where it appeared in multiple editions with illustrations, leather or silk bindings, and extra pages for tourist-readers

Eyes to See Them  115 to place photographs of the actual places represented in the novel.49 When Macmillan issued a cheap two-shilling version of the novel in 1887, the York Herald commented that a cheap edition should win the story the wider audience it deserves.50 When Sampson Low brought out its second edition of the novel in 1914, the edition was still “closely printed” at 380 pages, and the editor remarked that the novel “has not yet come fully into its own so far as the United Kingdom counts.”51 Perhaps, for the 1880s, the novel failed to be all that readable for the British because it was too long and too sentimental. Jackson biographer Kate Phillips speculates that the novel was structurally flawed as a vehicle of reform: its heroine Ramona is flat; in an effort to make Americans transcend their racial antipathy for Indians, Jackson made Ramona even more virtuous and cheerful and hence flat as a character than her Saxe Holm heroines.52 In an American review, Indian activist Elaine Goodale reported to be disappointed that Ramona allowed herself to be consoled by Felipe.53 Yet for white reviewers, as we shall see, the darkness of the storyline around Alessandro was often too much to bear. Those reviewers whose reviews veer into anti-imperialism, however, latched on to the dark storyline around Alessandro. As with the American reviews, British reviews tended to focus on the novel’s vivid scenery and romantic love story. The Morning Post praised Jackson for escaping the drawing room and drawing “picturesque” sketches of life on a ranch in Southern California.54 The Athenaeum called the novel “affecting” and full of “pathos” and praises the “idyl” in which Alessandro takes his bride through the wilderness as a “pretty episode,” treating the novel as an aesthetic attempt to portray real life truthfully, not a novel with a political message.55 In the United States, the novel has been credited with inspiring nostalgia for Spanish Mission architecture, and in Britain, too, the Athenaeum notes that Jackson “has revived the sentiment that clings round the traditions of the great missions” (802). The 1914 Sampson Low edition of the novel came dressed in a cover depicting an example of Spanish Mission architecture—and its introduction by newspaper editor Shirley B. Jevons failed to mention that Ramona and Alessandro were Indians fighting for rights over their land. In its review, the Standard used the words “pretty,” “sad,” and “beautiful” and like the Guardian assured readers that there was a somewhat happy ending.56 Julia Wedgwood, writing for the Contemporary Review, which was typically a Liberal periodical that meshed secular with religious thought and promoted liberal reforms in the 1880s, praised the novel similarly.57 Wedgwood was grateful that the novel provides a “refreshing contrast to [the reader’s] daily fare,” but she entreated the writer to “wring our hearts less cruelly.”58 Wedgwood was considered one of the greatest female intellects of Victorian England, and she supported female suffrage and cultivated an interest in gender (and may well have been chosen to write the review on this basis) but the review does not associate the novel with women’s rights (Figures 4.1 and 4.2).59

Figure 4.1  1  914 Sampson Low edition of Ramona. © The British Library Board NN.2346.

Figure 4.2  T he 1901 Ginn & Company edition of Old Indian Legends. Compared to the 1914 cover of Ramona, this cover looks indigenous. The spider in the “O” of Old Indian Legends represents Iktomi, the trickster who features heavily in the volume. The cover does, however, slightly misconstrue Zitkala-Ša’s name by removing the hyphen and misprinting the diacritical mark over the S. © The British Library Board 1243.cc.43.

118  Eyes to See Them Yet out of the 12 reviews I have located, six did touch on the novel’s political angle. The Academy praised the “tender and touching” love story and the “local colouring,” but it also noted that “some of the most striking and dramatic passages in the work are descriptive of the cruel treatment the Indian settlers met with in their expatriation and extermination by the Americans.”60 The Saturday Review likewise welcomed the novel’s evocation of “the full glow and colour of California sunshine,” but it also wondered why more people did not protest against government behavior toward the Indians: it seems scarcely possible that others do not join outspoken determined Aunt Ri in her horrors at the atrocities committed by the irresponsible Government under the name of law and order. After all, California is not the only place where, seeing the sin and suffering around them, honest, simple folk cry out like her, shame on the Government that allows oppression and wrong to prevail because it is no one’s interest to see that things are kept straight, whereas it is important to keep political facts—in other words, offices and ­privileges—in the proper groove!61 This is a rare exclamation mark from a periodical more known for irony, but its diatribe is directed safely only at the US government, not wider American or capitalist values. Even more pointedly, the Pall Mall Gazette review dealt substantially with the novel’s political discussion of Indians’ rights to the land: We could not easily find a more powerful or pathetic love story than that of Alessandro and the beautiful ‘Señorita’ . . . who has stooped to a suitor of such low degree. But the tale can scarcely fail to have another aspect for many of its readers. It is another voice of witness to a charge of monstrous cruelty and injustice on the part of the States to the Indian populations which have fallen under their power, a charge supported by testimony from all parts of the continent, and never, as far as we know, contradicted. It makes one’s blood boil to read of these wholesale robberies of land, held by a tenure really as good in equity as the most stringent conveyance, which citizens of the States have committed, and its Governments allowed.62 Unlike the Saturday Review, then, the Pall Mall Gazette blames the people as well as the government, and in the livelier terms (about blood boiling) that characterized this newspaper, which was a harbinger of the new popular press.63 Unlike many reviewers, the Pall Mall Gazette reviewer followed up the protest with a scrutiny of Britain’s own imperial practices, but one that ultimately lets Britain off the hook: “Our record

Eyes to See Them  119 in the matter of native tribes is not blameless, but it does not approach the infamy of these proceedings” (5). While the Pall Mall Gazette was decrying American treatment of Indians in Ramona, it was enthusiastically joining cries from the British press and public for military support for the imperialist hero, General “Chinese” Gordon, in his resistance to what the British saw as Muslim fanatics in Khartoum.64 All of that said, the British reviews of Ramona index the power that the tale had over a distracted readership. In tracing the legacy of Jackson’s novel in California’s tourism and heritage industry, Dydia DeLyser focuses almost exclusively on people’s reading of the heroine Ramona.65 As other critics have attested, Ramona is a whitened character who spends the first third of the novel as the adopted daughter of a wealthy Mexican ranch owner and who has blue eyes and pale skin.66 Reviewers, though, seemed most seduced by Alessandro Assis, the full-blooded Luiseño Indian. While Señora Moreno and Ramona are aptly characterized, wrote the Pall Mall Gazette, Alessandro is a more remarkable figure than either of them. Three reviews compared Alessandro to Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans but found Alessandro more “genuine.”67 This focusing on Alessandro rather than Ramona might speak to the masculine predilections of the press during this era, but it also speaks to critics’ willingness to step away from their drawing rooms into sympathetic identification with a sheep shearer and tribal leader whose worldview and needs are different from their own. The Spectator review is an example of one that, like many British writers on the Native, treated the Native as the last gasp of the feudal gentleman, with his passionate attachment to place and politeness that contrast so strongly with the mobile, rude American populace and the probable future for Britain.68 Like many reviewers, the Spectator reviewer opened with nostalgia for the patriarchal but comparatively humane racial and land system under Spanish and Mexican rule: The old system had been of the patriarchal kind, favouring indolence and wastefulness generally, and sometimes the growth of petty tyrannies, but on the whole, bringing out a kindly relation between the ruling and the subject class. The Indian had no rights that could be strictly defined or legally enforced; but he had a practically undisturbed tenure of what he possessed and what his father possessed before him. The word of the great Señor was enough; no one could dream of disputing it; he or those that might come after him would not think of going back from it. (221) This nostalgia for Mexican and Spanish rule resembles a nostalgia that Kate Flint finds amongst British women writers who invested Native American with qualities they admired in the English gentry, a passion

120  Eyes to See Them for the land and a chivalry toward women.69 The Spectator contrasted this Mexican rule to the “cupidity” of the Americans, like many British writers who bemoaned the American impoliteness and ruthlessness: Then came in a reign of law so-called, but a law interpreted by the needs or the cupidity of the new owners of the land. These vague and undefined rights are subjected to an inquiry which, of course, they cannot satisfy. The Indian community must produce its title-deeds. Immemorial occupation goes for nothing. If documents that satisfy the stringency of the conveyancer are not forthcoming, then the people are mere intruders. The claim of the newcomers is indefeasible. Are they not white? And are they not the stronger? (221) The very sentence structure of the review shifts when discussing American rule into a series of brief, declarative sentences without commas or subordinate clauses, as if to mimic the oncoming of a machine-age mentality. Alessandro stands apart from this machine age: This is the situation which confronts Alessandro, the actual chief, as viceregent of a father now falling into dotage, of an Indian community. It is a situation with great capabilities of pathos, of which Miss [sic] Jackson has skilfully availed herself. Alessandro has all the burden of the helpless community which looks to him for guidance upon his shoulders. Education has given him an intelligence and an insight far above that which is to be found in his fellow tribes-men. He sees the trouble which is coming upon them; he exactly comprehends its nature. (221) Jackson’s novel may have been politically compromised by the fact that her hero and heroine are too idealized. Yet for this reviewer, the book appealed because Alessandro was idealized, and as a true gentleman with a terrible “burden,” burden being obviously a word that resonated with imperialist ideas about Britain carrying out a difficult obligation of benevolence toward less civilized peoples. Subtle aspects of the reviews suggest that reviewers were directing their gaze not only at the American Empire but also at their own empire and the humanitarian, political, and financial problems that arose out of their dealings with subjugated populations. The terminology of the reviews is almost uniformly British. Jackson works on the sufferings of the “aborigines”;70 Ramona and Alessandro are referred to as “halfcaste Indians” (erroneously in Alessandro’s case);71 and the Indians are “peasants.”72 Julia Wedgwood’s review pairs Ramona with several British novels and the translated novel, The Poison Tree (1884) by Bankim

Eyes to See Them  121 Chandra Chatterjee, an Indian who served in the Indian Civil Service. Wedgwood found the subject matter of both novels almost unbearably painful to read, but the pairing again suggests that readers were being asked to draw parallels between California and the British Empire. Thus, it is difficult to extract anti-imperialism from the reviews of Ramona, even though there are fleeting and discordant notes of indignation and critique. Two reasons why Ramona may not have been very readable for British reviewers or popular readers might be the novel’s outdated sentimentality and the damaging fact that Britons could see the similarities between US treatment of Indians and British treatment of indigenous peoples.

British Responses to Old Indian Legends The reform that came about as a consequence of the Indian reform movement in which Jackson’s work played a large role was the signing of the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887.73 Helen Hunt Jackson did not live to see the Dawes Act signed or witness the consequences of the legislation, which was devastating for Native Americans, who lost their tribal land and affiliations and were under increased pressure to assimilate. A brief news item reprinted in the British anti-racist periodical, Anti-Caste, illustrated the broad consensus even among British and American liberal reformers that assimilation of Native Americans was inevitable and even humane.74 This periodical was almost entirely written by Catherine Impey, a Quaker woman who was a leader in instigating the anti-lynching campaign in Britain and who arranged Ida B. Wells’s visits to England and Scotland in the 1890s.75 This is the consensus with which a writer like Zitkala-Ša, born Gertrude Simmons on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota, had to contend.76 The periodical’s masthead proclaims its politics; it “Advocates the Brotherhood of Mankind Irrespective of Colour or Descent,” and it regularly carried news about African Americans but rarely about Native Americans. The following article is typical of the harmful attention Native Americans received in this periodical. Reprinted from the Isle of Wight Express, written by J. Stuart, entitled “The Red Man’s Future,” the article opens with familiar language about how Indians are an American problem: “America, and in particular the United States, has her problems to solve. One is the aboriginal Indian race.”77 People hate the Indian because they have done them wrong, Stuart says. He invokes the trope of the vanishing Indian: “If they cannot be civilised, internecine quarrels and Government control, to say nothing of the influence of rum, will gradually, if slowly, wipe them off the face of the continent over which they once reigned supreme” (4). At present, the Red Man can be seen “in every stage” (4). In England now are two extremes. Buffalo Bill shows the least cultivated. Bright Eyes (Susette LaFlesche Tibbles), the wife of

122  Eyes to See Them Mr T.H. Tibbles, who is lecturing in London and other cities, is a lady of utmost refinement, and is pleading in England for just and humane treatment of the Indians under the Canadian rule. Discussion of “bright Indians” leads into a discussion of the Carlisle Indian School run by Captain Pratt, where 500 students are being trained (4). The article extols the school’s virtues, admiring the near-European appearance of the female students and their fine command of written and spoken English. Such sunny descriptions belie the damage to young Natives done in these schools, as memorably described by Zitkala-Ša in her fiction. Reports of the Ghost Dance that swept across the Sioux reservation in 1890 reveal the glimmer of a new respect for Native culture and the Native ability to resist becoming Americanized, a respect missing from Stuart’s Isle of Wight Express article. Reports were openly fearful. In a Morning Post article from 25 November, Colonel Cody (Buffalo Bill), who was ordered to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, was interviewed as referring to the Natives as “fanatical Sioux” and said, They believe they are serving the Great Spirit. They believe they are celebrating the coming of the Messiah. There will be trouble unless the dances are stopped. What appears most ominous to me is the widespread influence of the Messiah movement. The Indians do not telegraph, and do not write letters, and yet all the Western tribes, from the coast of the Mississippi, and from British Columbia to ­A rizona, are dancing the Ghost Dance, and looking forward to the coming of the Great Leader. They will dance, yell, and tear their bodies until they are fairly wild, then go and scalp defenceless settlers.78 The language used describes the ultimate uncivilized brute, “fanatical,” “ominous,” and “wild,” dangerous, and strangely capable of spreading word without the help of modern technology. The new popular evening press, which reached a broad working-class audience, offered breathy, up-to-the-hour reporting on the skirmishes between the federal troops and the Sioux Indians that eventually led to the murder of Sitting Bull on December 15th and the massacre of more than 300 Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29th. Dispatches from Ottawa report that the Indians in Manitoba were not affected. Settlers were reported to be clogging roads in an effort to escape the conflict. The Indians were reported to be gathering at the beginnings of the Badlands, where canons and federal troops would be at a disadvantage in their operation.79 The Indians themselves appeared “completely terrorized.” According to the Pall Mall Gazette, The Indians think that the massing of such forces means their extermination, and they say that they expect to be massacred by the white troops. This opinion is not confined to the dancers, for the

Eyes to See Them  123 non-dancers appear to be equally frightened. All last night lights were flashing in the Sioux villages along the hills, and the scouts who were constantly arriving in camp report that the Indians are in a condition of panic, and that signals are being constantly exchanged between them.80 The Times complained that the Native ghost dancers were superstitious and excitable—“Indians are always half-ready for war, and the ‘medicine man’ can easily work upon their superstitions and highly-wrought feelings.”81 Recall that this was the very same year of the English Craze for Mary Wilkins, whose characters were also faulted for being overly religious and too highly wrought. Other coverage was less sensationalist and fearful. The Leicester Chronicle offered grudging admiration for the power of the Ghost Dance (on the very day of the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, although it had not been reported yet), reprinted from “the American papers.” The reporter had witnessed the Ghost Dance, accompanied a party led by a half-breed named Half Eyes, who translated the meaning of the Ghost Dancer chants for them. The Ghost Dancers are described as “fanatics” and “hostile Indians” who are in a “frenzy,” but their dance is described as artful and strong: They did not raise their feet as high as they do in the sun dance. Most of the time it looked as though their ragged moccasins did not leave the ground, and the only resemblance of dancing was the weary bending of the knees.82 The fact that the reporter compared the Ghost Dance to the Sun Dance suggests a certain amount of knowledge and respect for Native American culture. When news of the extent of the massacre filtered through to the British press, the Daily News acknowledged the bloodshed—other papers expressed only relief that the conflict was over—and expressed some concern for the surviving Natives: “Grave fears are entertained for the safety of Pine Ridge Agency, as the friendlies there are relatives of those Indians who fell in yesterday’s engagement.”83 This sort of reporting was rare, but it existed. Zitkala-Ša’s mother sent her eight-year-old daughter away to a missionary boarding school in 1884 to learn the American education, seeing only danger for her prospects at Yankton without it. Some early scholars identified Zitkala-Ša as an assimilator, a Native whose writing and self-presentation became unwittingly entangled in the white, feminized discourse of sympathy.84 Most scholars today have come to recognize Zitkala-Ša as bicultural, moving easily between the white and Native worlds, using the tools of her boarding school education and her lifelong work with white women’s clubs to further her causes, which

124  Eyes to See Them included pan-Indianism, citizenship for Indians, the closing down of the Office of Indian Affairs, and the preservation of Indian tradition.85 For an educated Native of her generation, these were radical causes. And yet, one can concede that Zitkala-Ša assimilated to a significant degree. Indeed, the writings in her two main book volumes, Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories (1921), are more accessible than Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) or S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema (1891). Winnemucca’s long volume combines the autobiographical with a focus on shared customs and traditions, a combination with which nineteenth-­century readers might have found difficult to cope.86 Wynema is a novel, surely a more conventional form, but a form that requires stamina that audiences were beginning to lose in this decade of the short story. Zitkala-Ša’s narratives could be more smoothly integrated into the publishing mainstream, as the first volume is a collection of traditional folktales putatively aimed at children, and the second, while featuring a combination of autobiography, fiction, and polemical essay writing, is cunningly arranged with the affecting autobiographical tales appearing first. The three autobiographical tales, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, which demonstrates these stories’ seeming palatability as standard magazine fiction, as well as Zitkala-Ša’s knowledge of American culture and her ability to please editors. British press coverage of Zitkala-Ša’s literary debut was slim indeed. The appearances of her stories in the American magazines were reported or advertised but no comments were made about their quality.87 Instead, a flattering but nasty description of her accomplishment playing the violin for the Carlisle Indian Band circulated widely through the British press, much as the description of Elizabeth Peabody’s intimacy with Sarah Winnemucca had circulated a few years earlier. With variation, the piece ran in these words, erroneously reporting on the Carlisle Indian Band’s planned trip to Paris, which never happened because of a shortage of funds:88 Paris will shortly have an “Indian” violinist as one of the attractions of the exhibition. Zitkala-Sa, a young Indian girl of great beauty and many talents, is solo violinist of the Carlisle Indian band, now on its way to Paris. She belongs to the Sioux tribe of Dakota, and until her ninth year was a veritable little savage, running wild over the prairie, and speaking no language but her own. She was taken in hand by the Quakers, and her great talent for music given free scope. At Earlham College, where she was sent, she earned many prizes for oratory, whatever that may be in the Far West, and then resigned herself to the study of the violin in Boston.89

Eyes to See Them  125 The reprinted news item is offensive both toward Native Americans and European American Westerners. Zitkala-Ša was a “savage,” and thanks are implicitly given to the Quakers for removing her from this state. Her beauty is mentioned before her talents. Oratory has little place in the Far West. Zitkala-Ša wrote Old Indian Legends in a spirit of defiance and independent conviction. She had left her position teaching at the Carlisle Indian School because of her disagreement with Richard Henry Pratt’s harsh policies and was studying music in Boston. When her autobiographical stories appeared in nationally recognized magazines, the general feeling at the Carlisle Indian School was that she was ungrateful toward the school and had exaggerated the negative aspects of an Indian boarding school education. Privately, the founder of the school, Richard Henry Pratt, wrote, insulting both her ethnicity and her gender, “But for those she has maligned, she would be a poor squaw in an Indian camp, probably married to some no-account Indian.”90 Ginn and Company, an educational publisher based in Boston, USA, commissioned her to produce a children’s book of Indian stories, and she traveled home to the Yankton reservation to teach school and collect stories from the elders. In the period after publishing Old Indian Legends, Zitkala-Sa was elected the secretary of the Society of American Indians and became the editor of American Indian Magazine, producing reports on the mishandling of Natives that were similar to that of Helen Hunt Jackson in the way they relied on newspaper accounts and other sources external to Natives, navigating silences to turn white documents against themselves.91 Although Zitkala-Ša’s second book, American Indian Stories, was not published until 1921 (and no British reprinting or edition of that book from that time has been located), she continued to be a writer and activist. As Jeanne Smith and Jeffrey Myers argue, Old Indian Legends presents itself as an entertaining collection of children’s stories—merely “retold by,” not “created by” Zitkala-Ša—but the volume differs from others of its kind because it contains an undercurrent of critique of white culture. Zitkala-Ša includes a brief preface with far more confidence than Mary Wilkins’s Edinburgh Preface; Zitkala-Ša pronounces Indians’ primacy on the continent: “And now I have tried to transplant the native spirit of these tales—root and all—into the English language, since America in the last few centuries has acquired a second tongue.”92 Zitkala-Ša pronounces the universal appeal of her subject matter: “The old legends of America belong quite as much to the blue-eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine” (vi). “Under the guise of tactful diplomacy,” Smith writes, “Zitkala-Ša’s preface to Old Indian Legends reminds the reader of the primacy of Native Americans on American soil and reaffirms the validity of Native American culture, thereby redefining its relationship to the dominant culture.”93 Whereas other collections of Dakota tales present their stories as a product of the past,

126  Eyes to See Them Zitkala-Ša asks her readers to understand that these tales are the product of a living belief system, and, as she writes, “sincerity of belief, though it were based upon mere optical illusion, demands a little respect” (vi). As Smith shows decisively, Zitkala-Ša changes some of the traditional stories to align the trickster, Iktomi, with cultural threat, emphasizing the destructive nature of his actions toward other creatures and the environment, warning against incursions from deceitful human agents from afar. Jeffrey Myers argues that the narrative arc of the stories moves from the benign to the ominous, which means that the collection implicitly critiques the tendency among nineteenth-century conservationists to protect only pristine lands devoid of people or animals.94 For example, in “The Badger and the Bear,” the bear is a clear stand-in for a settler colonist, dumb, petulant, and selfish. The bear arrives in a badger’s house asking for food, “starved” and “clumsy,” and when the badger gives him some, the bear uses his new-found strength to cast the badger family out of its dwelling (62, 63). Each evening, the badger, cut off from his arrows as well as his food stores, much like Natives on their reservations, must visit the bear and its family, now in the badger’s dwelling, and beg for food. The children are “ruffian bears” who hoot and shout when the beggar is humiliated, much like the Anglo settlers in Ramona, who speak in dialect and are cruder than the Mexican ranch owners—all except the youngest cub with “kinky wool” hair, a clear stand-in for African Americans, who sneakily helps the forlorn badgers (69). With undercurrents like these, it is possible that British readers, like American readers, picked up on the anti-imperialist messages of the tales. On the other hand, readers might simply have registered the continuing existence of magic and the harshness of outcomes for those who infringe a community’s rules. The four British reviews that have been located were slow to appear, and they were polite but quizzical. The Academy and the Saturday Review received the book but did not review it.95 The Pall Mall Gazette seemed turned off by the intermingling of animal and human characteristics that Jeffrey Myers praises as very different from the Western tradition of Aesop’s fables, in which the creatures are treated as less intelligent brutes.96 The paper wrote that, “The human and animal are interwoven in these tales in a manner too absurd to interest an intelligent adult, and in too confusing a style to be intelligible to a child,” and it criticized Zitkala-Ša’s translation for not being as smooth as Aesop’s fables, arguing that in modern English, they appear like “badly composed” Aesop’s fables.97 Other reviews were more positive. The St. James’s Gazette, whose readership was largely gentlemen frequenting clubs, praised Zitkala-Ša for succeeding to appeal to adults as well as children, suggesting that the reviewer felt the tales’ ongoing vitality. These tales are “told here with a vivid and sympathetic touch, and no mere antiquarian interest. Excellent reading for ‘grown-ups’ as well as for the children for whom they are especially intended.”98

Eyes to See Them  127 The Practical Teacher sounded condescending, calling the volume a “little book” of wide interest: “A fascinating little book to all who are interested in folklore, while its quaint stories have their value for a yet wider circle of readers.”99 Given the difference in its target audience, the magazine judged the stories useful for a teacher, because “the moral is evident to the most casual reader” and older children who have enjoyed the adventures of Brer Rabbit and Reynard the Fox will be able to trace the similarity of the moral messages that underlies all three sets of stories. The magazine approvingly quoted Zitkala-Ša’s statement that “the American aborigine seems at heart much like other peoples.” The Athenaeum was also condescending and appreciative at the same time. The tales are told with a “simplicity and naturalness,” the magazine averred, thus linking them to other efforts to preserve fading rural and colonized lives at that time. Zitkala-Ša has retold these tales from old Dakota storytellers for the benefit of “blue-eyed little” compatriots, and Many of these, and some, we may hope, of their cousins on this side, will be glad to make the acquaintance of Iktomi, the spider fairy, whose hands are always in mischief, Mantsin the rabbit (sic), Patkasa the turtle, Iya the spindle-legged giant, who thinks nothing of swallowing a whole camp at a mouthful, the man-hungry red eagle which is shot by the avenger with the magic arrow, the Great Grandfather, and all the people of the prairie.100 As cutesy as the rhetoric sounds, this is a rather full list of the cast of characters in the collection, which is difficult for someone new to Indian legends to follow, given the unfamiliar names and the confusing intermingling of animals and human characteristics. It is a bit dubious, though, to imagine that children will enjoy making acquaintance with Iya the Camp-Eater, since he is a frightening murderer. Like the St. James’s Gazette, the Athenaeum also praised the illustrations by Angel de Cora, which heightens the ambiguity of the stories, because textual rabbits and badgers are illustrated to look like human beings. In all, the Athenaeum, the Practical Teacher, and the St. James’s ­Gazette suggested that ­Zitkala-Sa’s volume worked as it was intended to on some British reviewers, to heighten the brotherhood of man regardless of caste or color, and to treat Indian traditions as vital and powerful in the contemporary world.

Conclusion Both Helen Hunt Jackson and Zitkala-Ša wrote to wake up white audiences to seeing and understanding Native Americans. Jackson was especially interested in selling her nonfiction exposé to Britain because of the influence that Britons held over American audiences. Although less extant evidence exists, Zitkala-Ša probably felt similarly. Both women

128  Eyes to See Them writers only partially succeeded in Britain. British sales of Jackson’s works were disappointing, but some reviewers at least decried the general levels of indifference toward Native American rights, indifference that masked disavowal of the similarities between the American example and Britain’s own indigenous difficulties. In many ways, Jackson’s Indian reform proved curiously unreadable in Britain: the shared transatlantic tradition of sentimentality was clearly losing its power over British audiences, and indigenous issues were simply too close to home. By 1901, because of the armed resistance of Native Americans and the modest visibility of assimilated, self-assured Native activists like ­Zitkala-Ša, it was harder for British audiences to express armchair sympathy for vanishing Native Americans. Although it is difficult to extract meaningful responses from the reviews of Zitkala-Ša, these reviews do register a fleeting taste for tales of cultural as well as individual survival. Jackson and Zitkala-Ša wrote books about matters that reviewers did not want to hear, and it is an achievement that they reached as far as they did. Helen Hunt Jackson and Zitkala-Ša, British editions and reviews*

Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonour British Editions H.H. A Century of Dishonour. Chatto and Windus, 1881. British Reviews A.A.E.C. “Literary Notices.” The Aborigines’ Friend (London), 1 April 1881, 350–1. “American Literature,” Saturday Review, 30 April 1881, 571–2. “History and Biography,” Westminster Review, July 1881, 264–83 (272).

Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona British Editions Helen Jackson (H.H.). Ramona: A Story. Macmillan, 1884. Helen Jackson (H.H.). Ramona: A Story. Macmillan, 1887. Helen Jackson. Ramona: A Story. Sampson Low & Co., 1911. Helen Jackson. Ramona: A Story. Intro. Shirley B. Jevons. Sampson Low & Co., 1914. * Most of these periodicals are on the databases British Periodicals, British Newspapers, British Newspaper Archive, 19thC UK Periodicals, or the Modernist Journals Project. Titles of reviews are listed only if they are different from the title of the book.

Eyes to See Them  129 British Reviews “Recent Novels.” Morning Post, 12 December 1884, 3. “Novels of the Week.” Athenaeum, 20 December 1884, 802–3. “New Novels.” Academy, 20 December 1884, 407–8. “Two Novels.” Pall Mall Gazette, 5 January 1885, 4–5. “Three Novels.” Saturday Review, 7 February 1885, 187. “New Novels.” Graphic, 7 February 1885, 142. “New Novels.” Standard, 7 February 1885, 2. Spectator, 14 February 1885, 221–2. “New Books.” Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1885, 7. Julia Wedgwood, “Contemporary Records, II-Fiction.” Contemporary Review, May 1885, 747–54. “New Books.” Derby Mercury, 23 November 1887, 6. “Literature of the Week.” Hampshire Advertiser, 3 December 1887, 7.

Zitkala-Ša, Old Indian Legends British Editions Ginn and Company, 1901. British Reviews Pall Mall Gazette, 7 February 1902, 11. St. James’s Gazette, 21 April 1902, 19. The Practical Teacher, May 1902, 598. Athenaeum, 17 May 1902, 624.

Notes 1 For the collaboration between white and Native women around Indian reform, see Heidi M. Hanrahan, “‘Worthy the Imitation of the Whites’: Sarah Winnemucca and Mary Peabody Mann’s Collaboration,” MELUS 38, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 119–36; John M. Rhea, A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). 2 “A ‘Boomes’ Rush,” Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury, 27 April 1889, p. 8. Further references will be cited in the text. 3 I use the term “Native” which is preferred by some contemporary activists, because it links the struggles of Native Americans to other indigenous peoples around the world. I also use the term “Indian,” because that is the term preferred by other contemporary Native American activists, including Zitkala-Ša herself. Although Canadian Natives often refer to themselves as First Nations people, I use Native to refer to both groups for ease of reference. The British press used the term “indigenous” and “Indians,” and as we shall see, this terminology enabled them to draw connections between the Native peoples of the Americas and the people of the Indian subcontinent as well as other indigenous people.

130  Eyes to See Them 4 Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), xxiv. 5 Porter, Critics of Empire, 50–55. 6 Porter, Critics of Empire, 9–18. 7 Porter, Critics of Empire, 139, 168–76. 8 In addition to Porter, see Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, ed. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 133–72. 9 For Catherine Impey, Florence Balgarnie and other women anti-­imperialists who were leaders in anti-lynching activity, see Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992), 169–224. 10 Porter, Critics of Empire, 155. 11 Rachel McCoppin, “Sympathy for the Other: British Attempts at Understanding the American Indian,” Symbiosis, 14, no. 2 (October 2010): 237–55. 12 Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 91. 13 On Jackson, see Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Bryan Wagner, “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Errant Local Color,” Arizona Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 1–23; Martin Padget, “Travel Writing, Sentimental Romance, and Indian Rights Advocacy: The Politics of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona,” Journal of the Southwest 42, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 833–76; Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). On Zitkala-Ša, see Ryan Burt, “‘Death Beneath This Semblance of Civilization’: Reading ­Zitkala-Sa and the Imperial Imagination of the Romantic Revival,” Arizona Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 59–88; Gary Totten, “Zitkala-Śa and the Problem of Regionalism: Nations, Narratives and Critical Traditions,” American Indian Quarterly 29, no. 1–2 (2005): 84–123. 14 Christine Holbo, “‘Industrial & Picturesque Narrative’: Helen Hunt Jackson’s California Travel Writing for the Century,” American Literary Realism 42, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 245–6. Further references are cited in the text. 15 Always canny about language, Zitkala-Sa also invoked Jackson’s phrase, “a century of dishonor,” suggesting that she approved of Jackson’s efforts for the Native cause. Zitkala-Ša, “America’s Indian Problem,” in American Indian Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 186. 16 Mark Rifkin, “The Transatlantic Indian Problem,” American Literary History 24, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 337–55. 17 For example, the temperance activist and campaigner for women’s rights Margaret E. Parker spoke of visiting the Ramona boarding school “where Indian girls are trained at the expense of the Government.” Margaret E. Parker, “Mrs. Margaret E. Parker in South California,” British Women’s Temperance Journal, 1 May 1887, 57. 18 Rifkin, “The Transatlantic Indian Problem,” 10. Christine Bold, “Exclusion Acts: How Popular Westerns Brokered the Atlantic Diaspora,” in American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey, ed. Sylvia Söderlind and James Taylor Carson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 93–123. 19 Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1968), 92, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UG1q AAAAMAAJ&dq=Immigration+from+England+to+the+United+States+ 156,171&source=gbs_navlinks_s 20 Flint, The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930, 107.

Eyes to See Them  131 21 Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio, ed. The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). 22 “News in a Nutshell,” York Herald, 8 December 1888, 5. 23 The name Sioux to refer to the speakers of Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota is less used today, but Zitkala-Ša used the term interchangeably with the term Dakota, as did most of the period’s press. Born in Yankton, Zitkala-Ša most probably spoke Nakota, although the name she devised for herself, Zitkala-Ša, meaning Red Bird, derives from the Lakota language. Because of this confusion, I primarily use the term Sioux. For a discussion of the terminology, see Tadeusz Lewandowski, Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 5 and 197n4; P. Jane Hafen, Introduction to Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera, ed. Zitkala-Ša (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), xiv. 24 The American edition was entitled A Century of Dishonor without the “u,” but I use the British spelling because I am referring to the British edition, which, despite using the same sheets, had a different cover that used the British spelling. 25 Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson, 230. 26 Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 144–5. 27 “Literary Gossip,” Athenaeum, 19 June 1880, 793. 28 M.C. “Mrs. Jackson,” Athenaeum, 29 August 1995, 271. 29 On the British response to American anti-lynching campaigns, see Ware, Beyond the Pale, 169–74. 30 Helen Hunt Jackson to Moncure Daniel Conway, 28 December 1888, The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885, ed. Valerie Sherer Mathes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 160–1. 31 Jackson to Bishop Henry B. Whipple, 29 October 1880, The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885, 136. 32 A.A.E.C. “Literary Notices,” Aborigines’ Friend, 1 April 1881, 350–1. 33 “The Extermination of Aborigines in Queensland,” Aborigines’ Friend, 1 April 1881, 349–50; “The Native Policy of the Dutch Boers in the Transvaal,” Aborigines’ Friend, 1 April 1881, 319–27. 34 “American Literature,” review of A Century of Dishonour, Saturday Review, 30 April 1881, 571–2; “History and Biography,” review of A Century of Dishonour, Westminster Review, July 1881, 264–83. Further references cited in the text. On the Westminster Review, see “The Westminster Review, 1824–1900,” Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, Vol. III, ed. Walter Houghton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 529–58. 35 “India and Our Colonial Empire,” Westminster Review October 1881, 486. 36 Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes, forward by Valerie Sherer Mathes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 179. 37 H.B. Whipple, “Preface,” A Century of Dishonour: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes, ed. H.H. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1881), vii, italics in the original. The Whipple Preface, along with the rest of the 1885 Harper and Brothers edition, is reprinted in Jackson, A Century of Dishonor, forward by Valerie Sherer Mathes, xix–xxiv. 38 A letter from Jackson to Whipple makes it clear that it was Jackson’s idea to enlist Whipple and Seeyle to write a preface and introduction, respectively.

132  Eyes to See Them Jackson to Bishop Henry B. Whipple, 22 May 1880, Jackson, The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885, 125–6. 39 Jackson, The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885, 96. 40 Jackson to Bishop B. Whipple, 22 May 1880, 126. 41 Flint, The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930, 15. 42 Douglas Owram, “White Savagery: Some Canadian Reaction to American Indian Policy, 1867–1885,” Kingston: Queen’s University, 1971. MA Thesis in History. 43 Jill St. Germain, Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada 1867–1877 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 8 and in passim. 44 Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015, www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Honouring_the_Truth_­ Reconciling_for_the_Future_July_23_2015.pdf. 45 Susan Gillman, “Otra vez Caliban/Encore Caliban: Adaptation, Translation, Americas Studies,” American Literary History 20, no. 1–2 (Spring– Summer 2008): 187–209; Susan Gillman, “Ramona in ‘Our America,’” in José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 91–111; David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Laura Lomas, Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Robert McKee Irwin, “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona: A Transnational Reading of the Old West,” Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West, ed. Reginald Dyck and Cheli Reutter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 153–78. 46 American sales figures and library circulation are addressed in Michele Moylan, “Materiality as Performance: The Forming of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona,” in Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 225. The disappointing critical reception is discussed in Valerie Sherer Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 82–84; Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life, 260. 47 Macmillan had a stake in selling American literature not only in Britain but throughout its colonies. Shafquat Towheed, “Negotiating the List: Launching Macmillan’s Colonial Library and Author Contracts,” in The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume 2: Nationalisms and the National Canon, ed. John Spiers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 134–51. 48 For the price of the Macmillan edition, see “Advertisement,” Pall Mall Gazette, 25 February 1885, 16. The Guardian called it “rather closely printed”; see “New Books,” review of Ramona, Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1885, 7. 49 Moylan, “Materiality as Performance,” 242. 50 “New Books,” notice of Ramona, York Herald, 16 December 1887, 6. 51 Shirley B. Jevons, introduction to Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson (­London: Sampson Low, 1914), vii. 52 Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson, 256. 53 Elaine Goodale, “Ramona,” Southern Workman (February 1885), in Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, ed. Siobhan Senier (Peterborough: Broadview Editions, 2008), 428–9.

Eyes to See Them  133 54 “Recent Novels,” review of Ramona, Morning Post, 12 December 1884, 3. 55 “Novels of the Week,” review of Ramona, Athenaeum, 20 December 1884, 802. Further references cited in the text. 56 “New Novels,” review of Ramona, Standard, 7 February 1885, 2; “New Books,” review of Ramona, Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1885, 7. The Monthly Packet review similarly described the book as “sad” while glossing over the Indian content: “Conversation on Books,” review of Ramona, Monthly Packet, 1 February 1885, 173. 57 “Contemporary Review,” Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Vol. 1, ed. Walter Edwards Houghton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 210–13. 58 Julia Wedgwood, “II.-Fiction,” Contemporary Review, May 1885, 754. 59 “Julia Wedgwood,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.­ oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb9780198614128-e-52808?rskey=ersYIL&result=1. 60 G. Barnett Smith, “New Novels” review of Ramona, Academy, 20 December 1884, 408. 61 “Three Novels,” review of Ramona, Saturday Review, 7 February 1885, 187. 62 “Two Novels,” review of Ramona, Pall Mall Gazette, 5 January 1885, 5. Further references cited in the text. 63 Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, “Introduction: Reading the ‘Fin de Siècle,’” in The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xiv. 64 For example, see “Khartoum, and What it Involves,” Pall Mall Gazette, 30 December 1884, 1. 65 DeLyser, Ramona Memories. 66 Moylan, “Materiality as Performance” traces the history of treating Ramona as white, 231–5. 67 “Two Novels,” Pall Mall Gazette, 5 January 1885, 4; “Recent Novels,” Morning Post, 12 December 1884, 3; “Ramona,” Spectator, 14 February 1885, 221–2. Further references cited in the text. 68 Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 94–95. 69 Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 93–95. 70 These sources use the term “aboriginals”: “Literary Gossip,” Athenaeum, 19 June 1880, 791–3; “Literary Gossip,” Athenaeum, 12 July 1884, 51–52; M.C. “Mrs. Jackson,” Athenaeum 29 August 1885, 271; “Obituary,” Leeds Mercury 2 September 1885, 2. 71 “New Novels,” 408. 72 “New Books,” 7. 73 Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy. 74 Siobhan Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 3–9. 75 Ware, Beyond the Pale, 173. 76 At the beginning of her writing career, Gertrude Simmons devised the name Zitkala-Ša because of a dispute with her mother and brother. She is sometimes referred to by her married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. 77 J. Stuart, “The Red Man’s Future,” Anti-Caste, December 1888, 3–4. Further references cited in the text. 78 “The American Indians,” Morning Post, 25 November 1890, 5. 79 For examples of this sort of coverage, see “Fourth Edition,” Pall Mall Gazette, 26 November 1890, 4–5; “America Yesterday,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 27 November 1890, 5; “The Indian Risin,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 30 November 1890, 2; “The Indian Rising,” Birmingham

134  Eyes to See Them Daily Post, 1 December 1890, 8; “The Threatened Indian War,” Western Mail (Cardiff), 1 December 1890, 5; “America,” Glasgow Herald, 2 ­December 1890, 7. 80 “Fourth Edition,” Pall Mall Gazette, 26 November 1890, 5. 81 “The American Red Indian ‘Messiah’” Times 2 December 1890, 3. 82 “The Ghost Dance of the Sioux,” Leicester Chronicle, 27 December 1890, 9. 83 “The Indian Rebellion,” Daily News, 31 December 1890, 6. 84 See Laura Wexler, “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 9–38. 85 For a review of the scholarship on Zitkala-Ša, see Lewandowski, Red Bird, Red Power, 14 and 201n33, n34. 86 Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance, 116–20. 87 “List of the Leading Content of Current Periodicals,” Review of Reviews, February 1900, 186–96; Ad for Harper’s Monthly, London Evening Standard, 27 February 1901, 4. 88 Lewandowski, Red Bird, Red Power, 48. 89 “Observations,” Violin Times, June 1900, 137–40. 90 Quoted in Lewandowski, Red Bird, Red Power, 46. For Zitkala-Ša’s state of mind when she wrote Old Indian Legends, see Lewandowski, Red Bird, Red Power, 37–46. 91 Elizabeth Wilkinson, “Gertrude Bonnin’s Rhetorical Strategies of Silence,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 33–56 makes this argument about Zitkala-Ša’s nonfiction reports, but it can equally be made about Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonour. 92 Zitkala-Ša, Old Indian Legends (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), vi. This volume is an exact replica of the first Ginn and Company edition, with all paratexts intact. Ginn and Company listed Old Indian Legends in Britain at 3 shillings 6 pence. Further references cited in the text. 93 Jeanne Smith, “‘A Second Tongue’: The Trickster’s Voice in the Works of Zitkala-Sa,” in Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective, ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Annette WhiteParks (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), 47. 94 Jeffrey Myers, Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 111–38. 95 “This Week’s Books,” Saturday Review, 18 January 1902, 88; “New Books Received,” Academy, 25 January 1902, 100. 96 Myers, Converging Stories, 124. 97 “Old Indian Legends,” Pall Mall Gazette, 7 February 1902, 11. This brief review is squeezed in between unrelated news items and an ad for cocoa, suggesting that the Pall Mall Gazette only chose to run it because it fits in an awkward space. All the reviews and notices appeared in 1902, suggesting that they might have been responding to the textbook edition of Old Indian Legends, which appeared in 1902 in the US, and is not housed in the British Library today. See Ruth Spack, “Dis/engagement: Zitkala-Ša’s Letters to Carlos Montezuma,” MELUS 26, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 172–204, 200. 98 Review of Old Indian Legends, St. James’s Gazette, 21 April 1902, 19. 99 Review of Old Indian Legends, Practical Teacher, May 1902, 598. 100 Review of Old Indian Legends, Athenaeum, 17 May 1902, 624.

5 Touching the Chords Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her British Fans

When reviewing the 1899 Putnam’s edition of Charlotte Perkins ­Gilman’s In This Our World, the Morning Post did not reprint any of the many verses advocating women’s rights, “since that particular subject finds little favour except among long-haired men and short-haired women.”1 The paper was wrong, because Gilman appealed to women and men who were not open gender rebels from the 1890s to the 1920s. She became a household name, her book volumes reviewed in the literary weeklies into the 1910s, her poems reprinted in women’s rights and socialist periodicals from the 1890s to the 1920s, and the contents of her speeches and articles for the American press or her self-published periodical the Forerunner reprinted in British newspapers throughout this period. Unlike Freeman and Wharton, Gilman was unashamedly feminist, the word appearing in her reviews for the first time in the late 1890s, 2 and her reviewers had to contend with her feminist ideas. The literary weeklies gave these ideas light praise, which might have been a disguise for deeper disagreement, but her style and her boldness were uniformly hailed. These qualities were also widely associated with her Americanness. When disagreements were raised, they were couched in terms that suggested the “average English reader” or the “ordinary reader” would object (both these designations were new terms in the reviews), but they, the educated reviewers, did not. From the socialist and feminist press, she received fervent praise. The daily papers treated Gilman as an opportunity for witty banter and ostentatiously raised eyebrows: “Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a heretic and a rebel,” wrote the London Daily News in 1905 in response to her lecture about the servant difficulty at the Women’s Institute in London, “She is not satisfied with that sacred and beautiful institution, the British (or American) home!”3 Gilman raised eyebrows because she was willing to challenge the sacred construct of separate spheres. Since the beginning of recovery work on Gilman, scholars have noted that Gilman expressed nativist and eugenic views in her work.4 Scholars have even theorized that Gilman’s feminism is bound inextricably to her racism.5 Few reviewers shared Gilman’s racist and eugenicist views, however. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman papers contain letters from her

136  Touching the Chords fans in England and Scotland that provide an interesting counterpoint to the published reviews in their fervent support for many aspects of her larger project. While published reviews of Gilman’s books and lectures praised or condemned them for their scientific mindedness, intelligence, and forward nature, personal letters testify to the subjective state involved in building a community of like-minded people across formidable distances. The majority of her fans did not share Gilman’s Anglo-Saxonism, either. While the press response was largely masculine in tone and nature, the letters were largely feminine in tone and nature, and to understand how the British responded to Gilman, one must know something about both discourses. Gilman popularized this way of thinking within Anglo-American feminist thought, in which a broad array of traits can be categorized as masculine or feminine, although she, as demonstrated in her book The Man-Made World (1911), hoped that all people would learn to become less feminine or masculine and more human. In this sense, it is fitting to characterize the discourse around Gilman using the terms masculine and feminine.

Gilman’s British Ubiquity Gilman was first published in Britain thanks to the personal efforts of like-minded people, and although her work certainly circulated on its own merit, notices in the suffrage press disseminated her work further than any trade publisher did. This distinguishes her reception from that of Freeman, Phelps, and Wharton, who relied upon trade publishers to transmit their work for them. For example, Gilman met a woman named Miss Catherine Spence of Scotland in San Francisco, and Spence carried home one of Gilman’s first books, the 1893 McCombs and Vaughn ­paper-bound collection of poetry, In This Our World. Spence liked it so much she arranged for it to be published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1895, and this volume of poetry became Gilman’s first British book publication.6 Her poems had appeared earlier: “Girls of To-Day” had been reprinted from the American publication the Woman’s Journal in the Liberal paper, Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury in 1889, and the British feminist magazine Shafts published “An Obstacle” and “Six Hours a Day” in 1894.7 The volume of poetry smoothed the way for Gilman to consort with reformers and feminists in Britain as its reputation preceded her first 1896 visit, when she attended the International Socialist and Labor Congress in London and lectured elsewhere.8 She felt that the book brought her “a far higher reputation than at home.”9 Indeed, Gilman critic Catherine J. Golden writes that the volume In this Our World “enjoyed a near cult following among socialists in the United States and England.”10 Hearing about the poetry collection, the Scottish Annie Chambers Dowie wrote requesting to buy a copy; when Gilman sent her a copy for free, they became friends, and Gilman visited

Touching the Chords  137 Mrs. Dowie and corresponded both with her and her literary daughter Ménie Muriel Dowie (Mrs. Henry Norman) for years. Ménie Muriel Norman worked at the Chronicle (probably the London Chronicle, a leftist Liberal paper) and arranged to get the book to a Chronicle reviewer, although, she warned Gilman, she could not control what the reviewer said.11 Gilman’s visits to Britain in 1899, when she attended the International Congress of Women in London, in 1905, when she came for a lecture tour, and 1913, when she lectured in England on her way to the International Women’s Suffrage Congress in Budapest, included public lectures at organizations such as the Women’s Institute, the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association, and the militant Women’s Social and Political Union.12 The Wrexham Advertiser review of Women and Economics was written by a critic who had met Gilman at the American women’s luncheon at the International Congress of Women that summer, and a writer for Hearth and Home complained that she was forced to wait weeks for the publisher to send a copy of Women and Economics before she could write her review.13 The public lectures received attention (some positive, some negative) from periodicals like the Westminster Review and the Nineteenth Century that did not generally review American women’s fiction.14 Although most of her lectures took place in London, they were reported widely, and there is evidence that Gilman’s witticisms, ideas, and books circulated among the working classes as well as the middle and upper classes. Her poem “To Labor!” and others on socialist themes were widely reprinted in the provincial and labor press.15 The elocutionist and performer Clifford Harrison recited her poems in Steinway Hall, and she was able to listen to one of his recitations during a visit to England.16 When her volume Suffrage Songs and Verses came out with the Charleton Company for a mere ten pence, the newspaper Common Cause, the organ for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, advertised it as useful for quoting at suffrage meetings.17 The magazine Votes for Women received the American Charleton edition of Gilman’s novel about housekeeping as a business, What Diantha Did, in January 1911, a year before any notices of the London T. Fisher Unwin edition appeared in January 1912.18 Gilman’s epistolary activities were a key means by which her work got disseminated and other people’s appreciation for her work got circulated back to her. Despite the seeming ubiquity of Gilman’s published work, private correspondence, and physical presence, some elements of her life did not get transmitted. She writes in her autobiography that news stories of her separation from Charles Walter Stetson and her alleged abandonment of her daughter Katharine were so pervasive that she had to leave California, and although news of her eventual divorce from Stetson in 1894 amused the Boston press, neither the abandonment nor the divorce made much,

138  Touching the Chords if any, stir in the British press.19 The habitually dry Academy coyly remarked about the mysteries of her name change from Charlotte Perkins Stetson to Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “But we wish we could understand the mysterious intricacies of her name.”20 The book Concerning Children, given its subject matter, might have inspired some discussion of her decision to send Katharine to her father and stepmother after their marriage, but it did not. One reviewer for the Dundee Evening Post noticed in the book’s dedication that Mrs. Gilman has a daughter Katharine, “‘who has taught me much of what is written here,’” but, says the reviewer, “in the absence of further information concerning that favoured young lady it is difficult to speak as to the results.”21 In Gilman’s case, then, the Atlantic was not a seamless garment, but a wide network with variegated nodes in which she could hide her controversial living arrangements from her far-flung readership. 22 At the weeklies where reviews of American women’s fiction and poetry were generally most likely to appear, Gilman’s reputation was formed primarily on her poetry collection, In This Our World (1893, 1895), her treatise Women and Economics (1898), and her long essay on child-rearing, Concerning Children (1900). Her later volumes did not receive as many reviews, and reviewers began to complain that she was repeating herself.

Good Sense, But Not Poetry In This Our World was a slim volume of poetry divided into three sections, the first containing poems about nature and California scenery, the second concerning women, and the third concerning labor and struggle. Reviewers recognized the poems as belonging to the genre of political poetry and chose to emphasize its women’s rights and socialist messages as they saw fit. Present-day Gilman critics follow Gilman herself in judging her poetry mainly for its social value, not its literary qualities; Gary Scharnhorst, for example, quotes Gilman saying in an 1896 interview that she did not call her poetry volume “a book of poems. I call it a tool box. It was written to drive nails with.”23 But as Scharnhorst’s research into British and American reviews of Gilman’s poetry attests, turn-ofthe-­century reviewers were largely favorable about the volume as poetry, as well as a political toolbox. The British were no different from the Americans in this regard. The Saturday Review reviewed the 1895 edition rather late, and the Athenaeum waited until the 1899 edition was out before reviewing it. In a brief review only one paragraph long, the Saturday Review wrote that she had a clear message that she wished to express but little mastery of poetic form. She is at her best in the poem “Desire,” they say (a poem about desire for sunshine and air with no obvious feminist or socialist content), which “is not poetry, but it is something worth expressing well expressed, the most sympathetic page in the book.”24

Touching the Chords  139 The daily newspapers were blunter in their assessments. The Manchester Guardian, then becoming a leading national paper for the Liberal perspective, conceded that there were passages that would not please the conventional reader, but also evidence of genuine ability, and it praised the humor of her famous poem, “A Conservative.”25 The strength of her poetry, said the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, is that it is “marked by strong common sense” and there is “no weak or maudlin sentimentality.”26 The reviewer lauds her as a poetess of the New World and a poetess of power. He does complain, however, that the robust tone leads into socialist thought in which millionaires and people of wealth are marked for derision and there are plenty of assertions of women’s right to equality. The Dundee Advertiser similarly complained that the latter part of the volume is drivel and the Graphic was one of many papers to complain that she would be better to convey her message through another medium. 27 The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent was so divided about the volume that it offered high praise thoroughly mixed with caution: The two latter sections deal with the woman and the problems of today as we meet them in novels, newspapers, and reviews—deals with them sensibly and robustly but without the note of fine thought made full and clear by patient art which surprises and delights the reader in the opening poems. There is [. . .] excellent sense [. . .] but not much poetry. 28 This kind of mixed assessment seems closely related to reviewers’ cautious approach to accepting women writers as poets of literary achievement rather than merely maudlin poetesses. When the time came to review the second edition of the volume in 1899, soon after one of her visits to Britain and Women and Economics, the Saturday Review was cooler, complaining that the wit is lost in translation: We wonder why Americans so persistently choose unpoetical themes for their efforts at poetry. [. . . O]n this side of the Atlantic we shall find neither diversion nor edification in a long dialogue between ‘the Specialized Cell’ and ‘the Ameoboid Cell.’29 The Speaker declined to review the volume, but nevertheless published a parody interview, John Davidson’s “Tete-a-Tete,” in which a literary critic tricks his mate into believing that women can write poetry by quoting from Gilman’s verse from In This Our World.30 In contrast, the Athenaeum was full of warm praise, declaring that she has a place among living poets for her work found in verses not directly instructive, and “this polemical poetry has a force and vigour of its own which may perhaps serve to drive home the arguments lucidly stated in ‘Women and Economics.’”31

140  Touching the Chords Given that leading literary weeklies like the Academy, the Speaker, and the Athenaeum did not review the 1895 volume, newspaper reviews grow in importance in shaping public taste around Gilman’s poetry. The newspaper reviews are true to the new terse and blunt style of the daily press, which followed on the innovations of the papers like TitBits (established 1881) and the Daily Mail (established 1896).32 Even the highbrow weeklies like the Academy and the Athenaeum had to publish reviews faster to compete. Cultural arbiters like T.S. Eliot and Queenie Leavis bemoaned the lowering of the public tone caused by these changes to the culture of reviewing.33 In Gilman’s case, we can see that the daily papers praised her own blunt, terse style and her wit and sarcasm, perhaps seeing it as similar to their own. But this new bluntness also meant an open condemnation of her women’s rights ideas. There was no such condemnation of either the sense or the scansion from the women’s rights press. The women’s rights newspaper Shafts offered warm praise all around: Stetson wrote, “surely with a pen dipped in the light of the future.”34 The poems “come straight from the heart of the writer, a heart in close and familiar intercourse with her own self, that ‘Ego,’ that inner self, that spirit, which knows” (29). The reviewer compared Mrs. Stetson to Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, because she had delivered her people by slaying the enemy. “Every woman interested in her sisters and her own up-rising will purchase this book. It will have a great sale,” wrote the reviewer (29). Both the uplifting and the sarcastic poems in the volume are praised. One stanza of “She Who Is to Come” is quoted. Like “Six Hours a Day” and “An Obstacle,” the poem commemorates woman’s potential, what she might become in the future if present-day developments progress as they promise to. The poem expresses hope and inspiration. The poem “Females,” about how female animals are treated like male animals except in the case of human beings, in which the human female is parasitic upon the male, receives three quoted stanzas for being “brimful of wit and sarcasm” (29). Reviews of Women and Economics were slow to arrive, waiting for the 1899 Putnam’s edition rather than the 1898 T. Fisher Unwin edition, but they universally declared the book a successful exposition of an important message that deserved serious attention.35 The Englishwoman’s Review wrote that the book makes a valuable contribution, because leading minds of the women’s movement have resisted the temptation to emphasize the differences between women and men, but this book’s dominant message is that there is evil in emphasizing this difference and that the race must check this exaggeration.36 The Westminster Review hailed the book as “[o]ne of the most original, daring, and, at the same time, thoroughly philosophic books recently published on the woman question” and praised it in particular for putting “aside all cant about motherhood, and show[ing] that the existing human method of maternity is injurious to the race.”37 Even readers who did not pick

Touching the Chords  141 up the book would learn the book’s central message that women’s economic dependence on men slows the progress of the race because this central message was repeated in nearly every review. Several reviewers quoted Gilman’s memorable line that we are “the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation.”38 Gilman’s style in bringing this message about was nearly universally praised for being “scientific” and logical. Wrote the Bookman, she clearly has a “trained intellect” (even though Gilman was largely self-educated), and “She has presented her case with admirable clearness and force, and with a wealth of illustration which shows a ready, vivid mind.”39 The Wrexham Advertiser review (written by someone who met Mrs. Stetson at an American women’s luncheon) similarly praised “the very sensible and reasonable way in which this clear-headed, courageous, intelligent American woman expounds and explains her views.”40 The Saturday Review once again praised this style as characteristically American, saying her “inspiration is derived from the expansive temperament of the great Republic of the West” and holding this temperament at arm’s length, in that “we recognise at once how much more hopeful one can be when one is not a citizen of a played-out European nation,” although this review, and most reviewers, found the conditions described to be true of Britons as well.41 Masculine-identified reviewers who wanted to enter into reasoned debates about women’s rights and potential found much to admire in the volume because as the Bookman wrote, “If you are in the mood to argue, [. . .], she gives you openings.”42 The Academy’s review argues at length that it is not clear that human mothers are less successful in their task than animal mothers and that the leisure enjoyed by women of advanced classes improves society because women can spend time educating themselves. Women, too, might argue with her claims, wrote the Wrexham Advertiser ladies’ columnist: “I should advise all my lady friends to read this book, not that they will all like or agree with the ideas and principles therein expressed, but I am sure that every woman should know about these things.”43 Only the Englishwoman’s Review complained about “redundancies and repetitions, and occasionally rather colloquial style.”44

Race and Anglo-Saxonism Cynthia Davis argues that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s vision of the world was conservative and narrow. Although Gilman theorized about embracing the world, and although she confronted the world during her visits to Britain, Germany, Holland, Austria, Hungary, and Italy, her vision of the world was populated by able-bodied Anglo-Saxons.45 That is not the way British reviewers saw Gilman, however. When they did not like her ideas about how to raise children or avoid suffocating women with

142  Touching the Chords maternal tasks, they dismissed them as too transatlantic, but they mainly warmed to her ideas and heralded her as an admirably clear-headed and forward thinker. There are two ways one can read this seeming discrepancy between Gilman’s views of the world and the British view of Gilman. A wide British readership does not preclude an Anglo-Saxonist readership. The belief that the best characteristics of the United States and Britain were their shared Anglo-Saxon bloodlines filtered through the cultures of both countries, and it would have been possible for the reviewers and fans of Gilman to simply share her beliefs about Jews, African Americans, or Southeastern European migrants. Perhaps the British reviewers were tone-deaf to the possible exclusive definition of the term “race,” as in women’s economic dependence is holding back the “race,” which is invoked without clear definition throughout Women and Economics. More likely, however, given the extant reviews, the bulk effect of Gilman’s work rests less in a comprehensive understanding of her entire oeuvre than in an idiosyncratic selection of pungent phrases and postures that struck reviewers as worthy of comment. Gilman’s next published book, Concerning Children, should have given reviewers plenty of opportunity to reflect on her belief that ­A nglo-Saxon culture was superior to that of other cultures. The book is a slight one, which she published while her work on a long and more ambitious volume, Human Work, had faltered.46 Nonetheless, the book was reviewed in Britain as widely as was Women and Economics. The volume opens with Gilman’s witty and confident description of her social Darwinist views: “Humanity is superior to equinity, felinity, caninity; but there are degrees of humanness.”47 “[R]ace improvement must be made in youth, to be transmitted,” she writes, following Lamarck’s now obsolete ideas that parents transmit acquired traits to their offspring. The application of this theory is unabashedly racist and eugenicist, as she writes, “If you were buying babies, investing in young human stock as you would in colts or calves, for the value of the beast, a sturdy English baby would be worth more than an equally vigorous young Fuegian” (4). The book elicited widespread anxiety, but not on its eugenicist grounds. Most reviewers agreed with William Canton, the poet and journalist, who praised her for being “original, revolutionary, [and] heretical” with “the freshness and suggestiveness which characterise the frank utterances of an independent mind.”48 “It almost takes one’s breath to think that some day our little toddlers, instead of playing about the floor at home, may be all sent away for eight or ten hours out of the twenty-four to a public nursery at the foot of the street,” he wrote.49 Although the Westminster Review and the Fortnightly Review identify British precedents for her ideas in the works of Herbert Spencer and the popular novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge, most reviewers found her work

Touching the Chords  143 frighteningly original.50 Reviewers warmed to the ideal of foregoing obedience as the main goal of childrearing, yet the Academy feared that a child brought up under her prescriptions would be “priggish,” the Athenaeum that it would be harmed, and the Saturday Review predicted that it would be an “impossible member of a disciplined household.”51 G.K.C. writing for the Speaker wrote that obedience was as necessary in the farmer and the merchant as the child, and questions “will Mrs. Gilman tell us what she would do if a child chose to deny that a curly figure meant eight and a straight figure meant one?”52 Is this the system which has given us the American girl, the Dundee Advertiser asked, and the Manchester Guardian joked that it would not surprise anyone who knows American children to know that there are arguments in America against obedience.53 The Athenaeum particularly objected to Gilman’s argument that a girl of 15 should be told about the possibilities that lie before her, service to society or motherhood, and nor do we think it would be altogether prudent to inculcate this kind of knowledge into the minds of children of fifteen; and it could hardly be expedient to concentrate young girls’ thoughts on the coming responsibility of marriage and burden of maternity.54 Although reviewers were content to import Gilman’s satirical poetry and her treatise on grown women and economics, this review finally dismissed Gilman’s ideas about children as too transatlantic: “The social conditions described are Transatlantic, and the ordinary English reader is not competent to gauge the accuracy of the descriptions” (629). This is just one of the instances in the Gilman reviews in which an “ordinary English reader” is posited to chastise Gilman for not being an anodyne enough public intellectual. The subject of childrearing was undoubtedly emotive, and Gilman’s forward ideas about obedience elicited shock. In all this glowing praise and polite condemnation, no reviewer touched on Gilman’s evolutionary theory or discussions of eugenics. This is somewhat surprising, because many of the New Woman writers of Gilman’s day like Sarah Grand and George Egerton were deeply invested in eugenic discourses about sexuality and reproduction, and not only because these discourses pervaded the social scene, but also because their interests in women’s true nature and poverty were understood at the time to be connected intrinsically to questions about the evolution of the human race.55 Perhaps feminist thinkers could sate their interest in eugenics elsewhere and turned to Gilman for other matters such as her attack on the separate sacredness of the home. Only one piece of press coverage that I have located associates Gilman with the arguments about eugenics. Frances Swiney, a suffragette and later member of the Eugenics Education Society, published an article in the Westminster Review

144  Touching the Chords arguing that the British nation is threatened by four evils: race degeneracy, increase of insanity, high rate of infant mortality, and decreasing birthrate. Her article ends with inspiring lines from Gilman’s 1904 poem “Coming”: Not for herself, though sweet the air of freedom; Not for herself, though dear the new-won power; But for the child, that needs a nobler mother, For the whole people, needing one another, Comes woman to her hour.56 It is easy to see the application of the poem to eugenic ideas, with women cultivating their nobility for the sake of children and society, but eugenic ideas are certainly not the only framework in which the call to women might be read. Thus, although Gilman’s view of the world might have been narrow and Anglo-Saxonist, reviewers adapted her ideas to non-eugenic ends.

Touching the Chords The letters in the Charlotte Perkins Gilman file demonstrate a distinct shift in tone and content from the published reviews. These letters resemble the reviews in Shafts more than the raised-eyebrow reviews in the literary weeklies and popular press. Letter writers expressed relief and exuberance that a confident, witty, charming woman has published their own secretly held ideas. They gushed with overwrought emotion, speaking of their adoration for not only Gilman’s work but also her person, heightened by the excitement of bridging large geographical and ideological distances—the international dimension of the contact heightened its appeal. They wrote of their own struggles to live lives of gender equality rather than tradition and in the process, they revealed loneliness and longing. This loneliness and longing make the act of reading these letters an overwrought experience itself. Letters are increasingly being read not only as sources of biographical information but as an important literary genre in their own right. They are a genre that easily crosses national boundaries; as Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris have argued, letters “offer[] particularly potent opportunities to dismantle nationalist paradigms” of literary study.57 They are intimate; letter-writing manuals of the era instructed writers to view the genre as a window into the self, and yet writers were also aware of the conventional tone and salutations appropriate for people of rank and of the real possibility that ideas expressed in letters would be transmitted widely.58 Rather than revealing any true self, letter writers adopted various personae for different addressees, and

Touching the Chords  145 as Denise S. Knight and Jennifer Tuttle have written of Gilman’s own penned responses to her many correspondents, they “run[] the gamut from intensely personal confessions to self-conscious attempts to construct her public image, putting her letters on a continuum with her published life-writing.”59 More recently, Judith A. Allen has argued a case for seeing Gilman’s letters not only as “intimate self-expression” but also an “intellectual venue” and a “fighting platform.”60 Like the newspaper or magazine review, letters are intersubjective: they are about the space between people, the relationship rather than the self. Finally, letters were clearly important to Gilman. We know this because she kept the hundreds that are preserved today despite her many house moves. The letters are annotated by what seems to be Gilman’s own hand with notes like “answr sent 26-2-13,” “nice letter,” or “Probably the people who twice ordered many copies of W. & E. and never paid a cent for them.”61 A file of letters from England and Scotland contains 55 missives, including a few telegrams, and a file of letters from Italy, Austria, Hungary, India, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, and China contains 36 missives. Ample evidence exists that this is but a fraction of what Gilman received and that she carried on a lengthy correspondence with many foreign friends. The letters from other foreign countries are similar, and so I have quoted from some of these as well. Fan letters are a specific sub-genre in their own right. What the scholar can study is always a small portion of the letters that an author received; in Gilman’s case, she seems to have preserved the positive ones. Bonnie Carr O’Neill’s analysis of the fan letters to Fanny Fern that were published in the Boston periodical the Olive Branch suggests that when fans write to an author, they imitate that author’s style.62 Whether defending or condemning the author, Fern’s correspondents wrote like Fern themselves; they were sarcastic, oblique, breathy, and droll: “Well, Miss Fan [sic], it seems we have found you out. A female woman! What made you tell? we might, perhaps, have imagined you a mermaid, or a fairy with invisible green eyes.”63 Their style suggests that the correspondents communed not only with the literature, or the person, but also Fern’s voice. In contrast to the droll letters to the Olive Branch, Gilman’s correspondents were forthright and confident. Authors and fans alike drew from intersubjective postures, evidence against the notion of authorial autonomy. Fans burst with gratitude for how aptly Gilman analyzed and proposed solutions for the problems faced by women. Women and Economics inspired the following remarks: “I have read your book ‘Women and Economics’ with the profoundest interest. It was exactly the book which was needed and I hope for great steps forward for all the women who have the good fortune to read it,” wrote Laura E. Morgan-Browne, from the London suburb of Ealing.64 From another London borough,

146  Touching the Chords Mrs.  L.C. Jervis wrote, “It is therefore refreshing when struggling against the stream to find one is not alone.”65 L.J. Mallet wrote, Will you pardon a total stranger who cannot refrain from venturing to express a little of the intense sympathy and admiration with which she has perused and is still perusing your wonderful treatise on Women and Economics? . . . You touch the chords which answer at the stroke when you assert the supreme need of every human being to be first “a human being”—and not even first, a mother. . . . You have expressed many of the deepest thoughts of; at any rate—one woman, and from the bottom of her heart she thanks and blesses you.66 Mathilde Herzfeld, originally German but living in Chelsea, wrote, I have only just read your book “Women and Economics,” and I feel too dazzled by its brilliant originality to attempt even a few words of admiration as they would involve valuations of a work which now seems to me invaluable.67 Writing from Vienna, Adele Gerber exclaimed, “When reading admiringly your book, ‘Women and Economics’ I felt deeply the great love with which you try to raise women to a higher and nobler standard of life.”68 The now famous modernist novelist Dorothy M. Richardson wrote, I have just finished reading your “Women and Economics,” and it has brought me the greatest happiness that has come into my life—I cannot express the feeling of relief and escape. The light you have held has altered for me the whole of life.69 Together, these letters express gratitude, joy, recognition, and solidarity in moving out of one’s physical bounds into a new feminist space—“relief” and “escape” being two of the most interesting words in Richardson’s letter. Such expressions of affective communion “gush” to overcompensate for the alienating aspects of enacting friendships across physical and cultural distances. As William Decker notes, it is commonplace for the letter writer to express intimacy impossible in face-to-face conversation, particularly when the addressee is across an ocean; Mark Twain used the term “gush” when apologizing for this aspect of his letters to his wife Olivia.70 The longing for Gilman is a continuing theme in these letters. Only one of the letter writers in the files offers eugenicist views when gushing with praise for Gilman’s works. Mrs. L. C. Jervis wrote that she appreciated Gilman’s idea of widening the bounds of sympathy by

Touching the Chords  147 removing the walls of home life and associating children with others of their age from birth. At this point, though, Jervis’s own eugenic ideas, and her acceptance of cant about motherhood, made her falter before she could wholeheartedly subscribe to Gilman’s recommendation that women send their children to be raised in public nurseries: This is where the human female is at such a disadvantage compared with the female of lower animals—after birth and the suckling period is over the animal is relieved of care, similarly with low human types—there is no strain over consideration of education and training.71 Gilman similarly seemed to believe that there would always be low human types that could help women with housework and childcare, but she did not believe that women needed to be disadvantaged by the extra childrearing required when living in a developed society. By comparing Jervis’s ideas with Gilman’s published pronouncements, one can see how Gilman swum upstream in combining eugenics with bold feminist ideas about women’s potential. It would have been so much easier for Gilman to likewise bemoan women’s disadvantage. Furthermore, Jervis’s views were in the minority among Gilman’s correspondents. Although many of these fans write deferentially, they were not just readers but writers, translators, and activists. Dorothy M. ­R ichardson became an accomplished author in the interwar period: Laura E. ­Morgan-Browne, who cheekily wrote Gilman saying she was not going to wait to be introduced to her but read in the Daily Chronicle that she was in London and wanted to make her acquaintance, published fiction and a piece supporting suffrage. L.J. Mallet translated for another speaker at the International Congress of Women in 1899, which Gilman also attended (though they did not meet), and she was active in suffrage and pacifism, while being married to Liberal politician Charles Mallet. Adele Gerber wrote Gilman to ask her to contribute something to the journal for which she was working, Neues Frauenleben. Some of the most interesting fan letters in the files have already been discussed by Lucy Delap: they were written by Ada Nield Chew and Susan Clegg of the “Gilman Study Circle,” run through a Workers Educational Association in the industrial town of Rochdale, which met from 1911 to at least 1931.72 Chew’s letter to Gilman adopts a tone of deference and indebtedness: “I want to acknowledge my debt to you, and to thank you for the ‘clear shining’ in the midst of darkness which your monthly ‘Forerunner’ brings.”73 Chew tells a moving story of being lent a year’s worth of the Forerunner just before a “three days holiday all by myself at the seaside” in which, thanks to the Forerunner, “the sea and everything else was a blank!” Despite this deference, Chew had been a trade union activist, writer, and suffrage organizer since the mid-1890s, when she wrote a

148  Touching the Chords bold set of letters to the local paper about poor conditions for herself and other women workers at a Crewe textile factory.74 Another fan letter reveals that Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was read in London 13 months after it appeared in a Boston periodical which was distributed in London but not printed there.75 In February 1893, a Mariella Balli from the suburb of Clapham Park became one of the first readers, but not the last, to query the story’s cryptic ending: Dear Madam, Your story of “The Yellow Wall Paper” which appeared in the summer of last year in a number of the “New England Magazine” has created a profound impression throughout my circle. We read and re-read it and discuss the ending of it, until at last I venture to write to you yourself and ask of your courtesy to let me know how you intend your clever and powerful story to end up. Some of my friends take it that the husband really faints, and on recovery will put the maniac wife under restraint—others are inclined to the idea that she kills her husband and afterwards hangs herself with the rope which she has mentioned to have secreted. I await with deep interest the reply which will conclusively solve all doubts.76 Balli enclosed a self-addressed envelope, her letter a poignant illustration of a struggle with the defining feature of feminist literature: like all literature, it has absence rather than presence at its heart, and like all activism, it beckons to an unknown future, which may be terrible or wonderful. Although not much is evident about Balli from the letter, other fans shared their life stories with Gilman. The personal life was obviously relevant to the gender reformation they were all interested in and specifically to Gilman’s arguments that women are human first and mothers second and that, as Gilman put it, “a woman can love and work too.”77 After reading Women and Economics and Concerning Children, Arts and Crafts woodworker A. Romney Green wrote Gilman declaring that he and his wife wanted to bring up their two-year-old daughter according to her principles.78 Bellie S. Bonnin from Australia attested to the enormous impact that Gilman’s poems had on the girls between ages 22 and 25 years old in a literary club, some of whom will be mothers in the days to come.79 Forerunner subscriber Iris Philips wrote poignantly of having left her husband after fearing for her life and that of her daughter: It is lamentable I feel that one has made such a mess of ones married life, but I did my best and it was no good at all, and now I love my freedom and having my house to myself and being my own mistress. a sense of freedom is worth anything on earth.80

Touching the Chords  149 Jane H. Windom wrote similarly from Lausanne, Switzerland, how grateful she was that Gilman had such an influence on her “moral and intellectual life.” As well as working with suffragists in France and Rome, Windom seems to have left her husband and possibly her children, a topic so anguished that it requires breaking into French: You will be glad to know, I believe, that I do not regret the step I took—and that I possess entire my children’s affection—I have found from my matrimonial experience more and more that “Certains êtres sont pour d’autres des rochers d’obstruction et qu’il faut du Tempsdes années et des années—pour èchapper à leur i­nfluence—à leurs paroles déprimantes—à leurs gestes découragrants—pour retróuver la sève qui donner la force.” [Certain people are as obstructing rocks for others, and it takes Time—years and years —to escape their influence, their depressing talk, their discouraging acts, and to find again the sap that gives us strength.]81 As the years went by, fans wrote of their hopes or fears about transmitting women’s struggle across time as well as space, as they explained how the next generation was reading Gilman. Ada Nield Chew wrote that her 13-year-old daughter read “The Forerunner” from cover to cover, while Frances Moore from Australia assured Gilman that her unmarried daughter devoured Gilman’s works.82 Indeed, Chew’s daughter became a feminist writer and teacher and edited her mother’s works in 1982. As well as struggling with their difficult personal choices, letter writers detail their struggles enacting reforms along the lines proposed by Gilman. Writing of her “interesting fate” of being the teacher of the Gilman Study Circle as they make their way through Women and Economics, Ada Nield Chew confided that, “as most of them have never heard of the point of view before there have been numerous shocks and violent shakings of prejudices. Some are very hopeless—clogged and blinded by their own willing slavery.”83 In a letter complaining about dwindling membership in the Rochdale Gilman Study Circle, Susan Clegg wrote, “I am now forced to admit that we have a lot of prejudice to grow out of. (I nearly said fight; but since reading ‘His Religion and Hers’ I am trying to dispense with that word.)”84 A few years later, Clegg wrote, “I also am beginning to think that it will take ages to solve the problem of the woman’s position and the child’s, we have to alter the whole conception of life.”85 In the 1930s, a Winifred Knight wrote that she began to lecture on the subject of economic independence for women but was appalled by the violence with which her work was met. Her sister was intrigued by Gilman’s Concerning Children and has one small daughter, but could not generate much interest in nursery schools in Hendon, Northwest London.86 In the letters, all of Gilman’s work receives notice, not just the major works that garnered reviews. Men and women continued to write

150  Touching the Chords throughout Gilman’s life asking for a copy of the volume of her poems (In This Our World), and Gilman works praised include, “To the Wise,” “Heroism,” Concerning Children (1900), The Home (1903), The Man-Made World (1911), Herland (1915) and its sequel, With Her in Ourland (1916), and Benigna Machiavelli (1914). Fans liked Gilman for being, like them, forthright, self-reliant, and confident. They heralded Gilman for blaming systems, not individuals. They agreed with her that suffrage was not a complete answer to all that women strive for. They were intrigued, and in some cases rather apprehensive, of the prospect of widening the bounds of sympathy beyond the home and associating children with others of their age from birth.87 Time and again fans hailed Gilman for not hating men.88 Iris Philips wrote that Gilman is the only person she knew who wrote on the question of votes for women without spite and without the assumption that all men were vile.89 The feminist network of the early twentieth-century period was at once transnational and communal, and yet still riven by nationalist differences and outright rivalries. Lucy Delap’s analysis of transatlantic encounters in the British and American feminist avant-garde shows that Americans coming to Britain were often chagrined by British suffragists’ greater militancy and advanced organizational skills. Commentators speculated that American men gave American women so many freedoms that their fighting skills remained unhoned.90 In that context, it is somewhat surprising that national differences come only rarely into play in the letters. World War I was an exception: letter writers told Gilman about the hardship they were facing and their views about whether the United States should enter the war. Once, in a letter from Japan, a writer expresses anxiety about Western ideas taking over the country.91 But for the most part, whatever qualms fans felt about following an activist from another country were rarely shared on the pages of the letters that Gilman chose to keep, and then only in a light, tongue-incheek way. As the aforementioned quotations attest, fans thank Gilman for expressing their own thoughts exactly and of pinpointing women’s situation precisely. The phrase quoted above “touch the chords” is apt. The aural metaphor conveys how writing from one location resonates with concerns felt in others without assuming outright identification between those locations, as in Wai Chee Dimock’s theory of resonance as a model for granting license to the reader across space and time.92 The letters offer further proof that Gilman’s ideas traveled freely and profoundly influenced people beyond her narrow sphere. They demonstrate that community can be about correspondence or resonance rather than physical proximity or racial consanguinity.

Conclusion Despite the fervent nature of Gilman’s preserved correspondence, the public reception of Gilman’s work grew less innovative and appreciative

Touching the Chords  151 after 1910. Lucy Delap and Marie DiCenzo theorize that the Atlantic crossing changed Gilman’s texts, such that readers in Britain could continue reading Gilman long after she had lost her seeming currency in the United States to newer thinkers like Ellen Key.93 That said, reviewers ceased to be as enamored of Gilman as they were at the turn of the century. Very few reviews of The Home: Its Work and Its Influence (1903) or Human Work (1904) were located, although What Diantha Did received a number of reviews, which often praised Gilman for the foresight of putting her ideas about professionalizing service and cooking in fiction form. A Gilman idea that percolated widely was her critique of the androcentric world in The Man-Made World or our Androcentric Culture, which received a handful of reviews. The Liberal press explained her findings. The Observer wrote that she drew from Lester Ward’s theory that the female is the true race type and the male a variant for sex purposes, a theory that led her to argue that women should take a stronger role in mate selection. The paper’s assessment was that the ideas were based too much on speculation, but “undoubtedly ingenious and suggestive.”94 The Manchester Guardian similarly summarized her ideas at length, writing that society is founded too much solely on the androcentric ideals of desire, combat, and self-­ expression, although it complained that the book was given to “tiresome repetitions.”95 The Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Review merely wrote that Gilman did not like the man-made world, but she writes with wit and honesty, and, like all original thinkers, writes for those who will disagree with her.96 Other papers expressed unease at her wholesale criticism of everything masculine. “Most of Mrs. Gilman’s criticism is destructive,” declared the Scotsman, “and her reader is rather at a loss to know how the process is to be reversed.”97 As World War I began, Gilman’s ideas about women speaking out on public matters were harnessed in the anti-war effort: her Forerunner piece, “Two Essays on the War,” was reprinted in the Irish Citizen, on how European powers are playing out male ideas of domination, and how women should speak up and denounce the war.98 The most controversial of Gilman’s ideas remain controversial today, and it is no surprise that reviewers were uncomfortable with her ideas at times. The largely feminine fan letters mitigate the effect of the reviews. While the reviews praised Gilman for being heretical, reasonable, and scientific, the fan letters praise her for offering other free thinkers communion. Some clouds are on the horizon in the preserved letter files: writers asking for reprints of Gilman’s poems or speeches often plea poverty and ask for a discount or do not mention payment at all, suggesting that Gilman’s generosity was being tested. Foreigners who first wrote in Italian or German eventually switched to English, demonstrating the lack of linguistic diversity in Gilman’s circles. Some of Gilman’s ideas about degrees of humanness that various peoples around the world exhibit are ideas that feminists have been wise to reject. Other ideas of Gilman’s

152  Touching the Chords were sound. Putting housework on a professional basis remains a goal for feminist activism. Gilman’s ideas that we should try to run a society that is human rather than overwhelmingly masculine anticipate today’s interest in gender fluidity. Such ideas would have to wait decades before the press would understand them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, British editions and reviews*

In This Our World: Poems and Sonnets British Editions Fisher Unwin, 1895, 1899. British Reviews “Literary Notices.” Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. 28 February 1896, 7. Shafts. March 1896, 29. Dumfries, Scotland, clipping from unknown paper, March 1896, Gilman Papers, Collection 177, Folder 298. “The Literary Advertiser—III.” Cosmopolis. March 1896, 3. “New Poetry.” Scotsman. 2 March 1896, 3. Dundee Advertiser. 5 March 1896, 2. “The Unclassed.” Graphic. 21 March 1896. “An American Poetess.” Sheffield Daily Telegraph. 25 March 1896, 8. “Books of the Day.” Liverpool Mercury. 1 April 1896. Saturday Review. 25 April 1896, 438. “Books of the Week.” Manchester Guardian. 12 May 1896, 5. Morning Post. 19 October 1899, 2. Saturday Review. 2 December 1899, 88. (reviewing the 1899 edition) Athenaeum. 30 December 1899, 893. H.F. Chettle. Common Cause. 15 September 1910, 11.

Women and Economics: A Study between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution British Editions T. Fisher Unwin, 1898. Putnam’s, 1899. * Most of these periodicals are on the databases British Periodicals, British Newspapers, British Newspaper Archive, 19thC UK Periodicals, or the Modernist Journals Project. Titles of reviews are listed only if they are different from the title of the book.

Touching the Chords  153 Putnam’s, 1906. Introduction by Stanton Coit. Putnam’s, 1912. New introduction by the author. Putnam’s, 1915. British Reviews Bookman. September 1899, 164. Warwick Advertiser. 2 September 1899, 5. “Woman.” Academy. 30 September 1899, 330–1. Sarah Volatile, “Books and Authors.” Hearth and Home. 5 October 1899, 812. “Our Ladies’ Column.” Wrexham Advertiser. 7 October 1899, 2. Englishwoman’s Review. 16 October 1899, 272–4. Morning Post. 19 October 1899, 2. “Socialism and Sex.” Saturday Review. 28 October 1899, 556. “The Emancipation of Women.” Ross Gazette (Herefordshire), 9 ­November 1899, 3. “History and Biography.” Westminster Review, February 1900, 224. “The Emancipation of Women.” Eastborne Gazette (Sussex) 2 January 1901, 6. “Are Women Over-Sexed?” Review of Reviews. August 1902, 188. “New Books.” Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1905, 5. A Border Woman, “Women’s Work and Interests.” Berwickshire News, 26 November 1912, 5.

Concerning Children British Editions G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901. Watts and Co, 1907. Introduction by Margaret McMillan. British Reviews “New Books.” Scotsman. 18 February 1901, 2. G.K.C. “A Denunciation of Parents.” Speaker. 9 March 1901, 627–8. Academy. 16 March 1901, 228. Saturday Review. 16 March 1901, 342. “Literature.” Bradford Observer. 22 March 1901, 8. “Books of the Week.” Manchester Guardian. 26 March 1901, 4. “The New Books of the Month.” Bookman. April 1901, 28–32. “An American System of Child Training.” Dundee Evening Post. 1 April 1901, 6. “Sociology, Politics, and Jurisprudence.” Westminster Review, May 1901, 585–9.

154  Touching the Chords Athenaeum, 18 May 1901, 628–9. William Canton, Good Words, December 1901, 213–7. “The Child.” Academy 14 March 1903, 245–6.

The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture British Edition T. Fisher Unwin, 1911 British Reviews Scotsman. 13 November 1911, 2. “The Easy Chair.” Observer, 19 November 1911, 7. “Court and Personal.” Sheffield Daily Telegraph. 23 November 1911, 6. “New Books.” Manchester Guardian. 12 January 1912, 5. Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Review. 1 January 1912, 181. Vote, 13 January 1912, 136.

Notes 1 Review of In This Our World, Morning Post, 19 October 1899, 2. 2 One early appearance of the word “feminist” is in Sarah Volatile’s discussion of Women and Economics in Hearth and Home: “It is, of course, an outcome of the great feminist movement which has marked the present decade.” Sarah Volatile, “Books and Authors,” Hearth and Home, 5 October 1899, 812. 3 “The Servant Difficulty,” London Daily News, 21 February 1905, 6. 4 Ann J. Lane, Introduction to Herland (London: Women’s Press, 1979), xvii–xviii. 5 Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1989): 415–41. 6 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 201–11. 7 Charlotte Perkins Stetson, “Girls of To-Day,” Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury, 7 September 1889, n. pag.; Charlotte Stetson, “An Obstacle,” Shafts, November–December 1884, 345; Charlotte Perkins Stetson, “Six Hours a Day,” Shafts, November–December 1884, 359. 8 Although she does not mention lecturing around the country in her autobiography, a series of lectures in Glasgow are announced in Advertisement. Glasgow Herald, 14 November 1896, n. pag. 9 Gilman, The Living, 201. 10 Catherine J. Golden, “‘Written to Drive Nails With’: Recalling the Early Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, ed. Jill Rudd and Val Gough (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 244.

Touching the Chords  155 11 Ménie Muriel Norman to Gilman, 14 January 1899, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Collection 177, folder 150, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living, 170, 211. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers will henceforth be cited as “Gilman Papers.” 12 “Notes and Comments,” Yorkshire Post, 12 May 1913, 6. 13 “Our Ladies’ Column,” Wrexham Advertiser, 7 October 1899, 2; Sarah Volatile, “Books and Authors,” Hearth and Home, 5 October 1899, 812. 14 The Westminster Review was positive, the Nineteenth Century negative. Frances H. Low, “A Woman’s Criticism of the Women’s Congress,” Nineteenth Century, August 1899, 192–202; Ignota, “Women in International Conference,” Westminster Review, January 1905, 56–66. 15 “Dare for the Right,” Aberdeen People’s Journal, 20 December 1902, 9. 16 “London Letter,” London Daily News, 6 November 1906, 6. 17 Advertisement for Suffrage Songs and Verses, Common Cause, 1 June 1911, 143. 18 “Books Received,” Votes for Women. 20 January 1911, 258. 19 Gilman, The Living, 142–5, 176. 20 Review of Concerning Children, Academy, 16 March 1901, 228. British journalists reading off book volumes called the author Charlotte Perkins Stetson until Concerning Children appeared in 1900, the first volume published under the name Gilman, and until they stopped reprinting poems from In This Our World. In the 1890s, she was referred to as C.P. Gilman, Charlotte Stetson, Charlotte P. Stetson, etc. Journalists were unaware that the “Perkins” in her name linked to the prestigious Beecher family and seemingly did not know the sordid reputation of her divorce. For ease of reference, I refer to the author as “Gilman” throughout. 21 “An American System of Child Training,” Dundee Evening Post, 1 April 1901, 6. 22 For an interesting reading of Gilman’s misgivings about her decision to send Katharine to her father and stepmother as evidenced symbolically in her short fiction, see Jill Rudd, “The Torn Voice in ‘The Giant Wisteria’ and ‘The Unnatural Mother,’” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts, ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 211), 69–84. 23 Quoting from the Topeka State Journal, Gary Scharnhorst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 40. That said, some Gilman critics have highlighted Gilman’s skillful use of meter, rhyme, and imagery. See Golden, ‘“Written to Drive Nails With”’; Denise D. Knight, “‘But O My Heart’: The Private Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, ed. Jill Rudd and Val Gough (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 267–84. 24 Review of In This Our World, Saturday Review, 25 April 1896, 438. 25 Review of In This Our World, Manchester Guardian, 12 May 1896, 5. 26 Review of In This Our World, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 25 March 1896, 8. 27 “The Unclassed,” review of In This Our World, Graphic, 21 March 1896, 27; Review of In This Our World, Dundee Advertiser, 5 March 1896, 2. 28 “Literary Notices,” Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 28 February 1896, 7. 29 Review of In This Our World, Saturday Review, 2 December 1899, 711. 30 John Davidson, “Tete-a-Tete,” Speaker, 29 July 1899, 99. 31 Review of In This Our World, Athenaeum, 30 December 1899, 893. 32 Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 102.

156  Touching the Chords 33 Joanne Shattock, “The Culture of Criticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914, ed. Joanne Shattock, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 79–81; Adrian Bingham, “Cultural ­H ierarchies and the Interwar British Press,” in Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960, ed. Erica Brown and Mary ­Grover (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 57, 64. 34 Review of In This Our World, Shafts, March 1896, 29. Further references cited in the text. 35 Gary Scharnhorst notes that the American reviews were similarly respectful and admiring, and he notes that Gilman was very pleased with both the American and British reviews, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 54–56. 36 Review of Women and Economics, Englishwoman’s Review, 16 October 1899, 272–4. 37 Review of Women and Economics, Westminster Review, February 1900, 227. 38 Quoted in, for example, Sarah Volatile, “Books and Authors,” Hearth and Home, 5 October 1899, 812. 39 Review of Women and Economics, Bookman, September 1899, 164. 40 “Our Ladies’ Column,” Wrexham Advertiser, 7 October 1899, 2. 41 “Socialism and Sex,” review of Women and Economics, Saturday Review, 28 October 1899, 556. 42 Review of Women and Economics, Bookman, September 1899, 163–4. 43 “Our Ladies’ Column,” Wrexham Advertiser, 7 October 1899, 2. 4 4 Review of Women and Economics, Englishwoman’s Review, 16 October 1899, 273. 45 Cynthia Davis, “Abroad, Yet Narrow: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Transatlantic World,” conference paper at Transatlantic Women II, Nineteenth-­ Century American Women Writers Abroad, Florence, Italy, June 2013. 46 Scharnhorst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 60, 64. 47 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Concerning Children (London: Putnam’s, 1903),  3. https://archive.org/details/concerningchildr00gilmuoft. Further references appear in the text. 48 William Canton, “From One Point of View,” Good Words December 1901, 213. 49 Canton, “From One Point of View,” 215. 50 “Sociology, Politics, and Jurisprudence,” review of Concerning Children, Westminster Review May 1901, 585–9; Edward H. Cooper, “Charlotte Mary Yonge,” Fortnightly Review May 1901, 852–8. 51 “The Child,” review of Concerning Children, Academy 14 March 1903, 246; “Concerning Children,” Athenaeum 18 May 1901, 628–9; “Concerning Children,” Saturday Review 16 March 1901, 342. 52 G.K.C., “A Denunciation of Parents,” review of Concerning Children, Speaker 9 March 1901, 628. 53 “An American System of Child Training,” Dundee Evening Post, 1 April 1901, 6; “Books of the Week,” review of Concerning Children, Manchester Guardian, 26 March 1901, 4. 54 Athenaeum, 18 May 1901, 628. Further references cited in the text. 55 Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 56 Frances Swiney, “The Omnipotent Halfpenny,” Westminster Review, February 1906, 158–71. This poem is also reprinted in In This Our World & Uncollected Poems, ed. Gary Scharnhorst and Denise D. Knight (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 165.

Touching the Chords  157 57 Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris, introduction to Letters and Cultural Transformations in the U.S., 1760–1860, ed. Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 9. 58 Gaul and Harris, “Introduction,” 16. 59 Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle, introduction to The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), xvii. 60 Judith A. Allen, “A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Epistles,” in Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing, ed. Celeste-Marie Bernier, Matthew Pethers, and Judith Newman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 466, 468. 61 Maruzen to Gilman, n.d., Gilman Papers, folder 149. 62 Bonnie Carr O’Neill, “‘Does Such a Being Exist?’: Olive Branch Readers Respond to Fanny Fern,” in Letters and Cultural Transformations in the U.S., 1760–1860, ed. Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 161–77. 63 Quoted in O’Neill, “Does Such a Being Exist?” 171. 64 Laura E. Morgan-Browne to Gilman, 14 May 1899, Gilman Papers, folder 150. Throughout the correspondence quotations in this chapter, I silently change all plus signs in the correspondence to “and.” 65 Mrs. L.C. Jervis, 3 November 1899, Gilman Papers, folder 150. 66 L.J. Mallet to Gilman, 9 November 1899, Gilman papers, folder 150. ­Emphasis in the original. 67 Mathilde Herzfeld to Gilman, 8 July n.d. Gilman papers, folder 150. 68 Adele Gerber to Gilman, 29 November 1902, Gilman papers, folder 152. 69 Dorothy M. Richardson to Gilman, n.d., Gilman papers, folder 150. 70 William Merrill Decker, “Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now,” in Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-­ Century American Letters and Letter Writing, ed. Celeste-Marie Bernier, Matthew Pethers, and Judith Newman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 178. 71 Jervis to Gilman, 3 November 1899. 72 Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 48, 76. 73 Ada Nield Chew to Gilman, 10 December 1911, Gilman Papers, folder 150. 74 See Ada Nield Chew, The Life and Writings of a Working Woman, presented by Doris Nield Chew (London: Virago, 1982). 75 Rachel Brett, British Library Reference Librarian, email to author, 10 ­February 2015. 76 Mariella Balli to Gilman, 18 February 1893, Gilman Papers, folder 150. 77 Judith A. Allen quotes this phrase from a letter Gilman wrote to her second husband before their marriage: Gilman to George Houghton Gilman, 26 July 1899, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900, ed. Mary A. Hill (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1995), 274. Quoted in Judith Allen, “A Fighting Platform,” 465. 78 A. Romney Green to Gilman, 22 April 1903, Gilman Papers, folder 150. 79 Bellie S. Bonnin to Gilman, 27 May 1906, Gilman Papers, folder 152. 80 Iris Philips to Gilman, 18 March 1916, Gilman Papers, folder 150. 81 Jane H. Windom to Gilman, 14 February 1913, Gilman Papers, folder 152. French translation by Sandrine Bergès. 82 Ada Nield Chew to Gilman, 10 December 1911, Gilman Papers, folder 150; Frances Moore to Gilman, 6 February 1917, Gilman Papers, folder 152.

158  Touching the Chords 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98

Ada Nield Chew to Gilman, 10 December 1911, Gilman Papers, folder 150. Susan Clegg to Gilman, 22 December 1926, Gilman Papers, folder 150. Susan Clegg to Gilman, 19 November 1931, Gilman Papers, folder 150. Winifred Knight to Gilman, 7 April 1932, Gilman Papers, folder 150. Mrs. L.C. Jervis to Gilman, 3 November 1899, Gilman Papers, folder 150. For example, see Ada Nield Chew to Gilman, 10 December 1911, Gilman Papers, folder 150. Iris Philips to Gilman, 18 March 1918, Gilman Papers, folder 150. Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 66–101. Unoski Wakamiya to Gilman, 17 May 1909, Gilman Papers, folder 152. Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (October 1997): 1060–71. Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo, “Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-­ American Feminist Press and Emerging ‘Modernities,’” in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, ed. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 60. “The Easy Chair,” review of The Man-Made World, Observer, 19 November 1911, 7. “New Books,” review of The Man-Made World, Manchester Guardian, 12 January 1912, 5. Review of The Man-Made World, Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Review, 1 January 1912, 181. Review of The Man-Made World, Scotsman, 13 November 1911, 2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Two Essays on the War,” Irish Citizen, 16 January 1915, 266.

6 The Customs of that Other Country Reading Edith Wharton in Britain

The story of Wharton in Britain might be read as a story of arrival. For both the American authoress and the British reviewers, there seemed, for most of the time, to be a situation of perfect communication via the transatlantic marketplace, of finished, polished writing published in beautiful editions, of short lags and minor differences between New York and London editions that were improved on the author’s request, of informed and perceptive reviews, of intelligent readership, and of ongoing availability of her books in subscription and free libraries. Just as Wharton wished for, she garnered both critical acclaim and a large readership. Many factors contributed to this situation of seamless communication: the proven value of American literature, the United States’ increasingly powerful presence on the world stage, Wharton’s class connections, and above all, her mastery as a writer. Wharton treated Britons to finely crafted writing that also conveniently served as a window into some of the most vivid and powerful new developments of US life: the moral complexities of love, high society, business, travel, and art. In the novels, short stories, travel books, and poetry themselves, and in the way the reviewers responded to them and framed them for ordinary readers, one can feel realism evolve into modernism and nationalism into cosmopolitanism. Unsophisticated discussions earlier in the century about whether American literature accurately represents American life grew sophisticated in the conceptualization of realism, literary craft, and transatlantic scandal. The discussion of Wharton’s art was versatile, though it was interspersed with a large degree of schadenfreude in which British reviewers expressed gleeful dismay over the raucous horrors of American “high” society. This schadenfreude has been recognized by Wharton scholars but needs to be seen in the context of reviews that were generally positive toward the author’s society. The chapter begins by tracing Wharton’s reputation as it was established before she wrote The House of Mirth. I argue that the British marketplace’s expectations about fiction’s length played a major role in Wharton’s aspiration to write full-length novels. Once she wrote full-length novels, she was granted massive cultural authority. The elements of Wharton’s fiction that made her a modern writer (the diffuseness of the moral message, the interest in the sex

160  The Customs of that Other Country relation) also made her a writer of and for women. The nascent feminist readings of her work demonstrate the interconnectedness of her modernity and her feminism. Finally, I analyze what happened to this nascent feminist reading as American and British critical responses diverged during World War I. The extensive materials available for studying Wharton, such as a descriptive bibliography of her work, a paperback reprinting of the main US and British reviews, a critical edition of her correspondence with Frederick Macmillan and the Macmillan house, and many other scholars working on her reception, enrich this study.1 Given the availability of this evidence, this chapter compares the British reviews with the reprinted American reviews and draws on the correspondence between Wharton and one of her British editors to attend to business considerations that also affected the other authors featured in this book. Wharton presents unique considerations as well. Names of Edith Wharton’s friends and acquaintances like Walter Berry, Henry James, Sir George Trevelyan, Alice Meynell, and Percy Lubbock appear next to the reviews of some of her works or can be traced to them. This cozy relation between author and reviewer is one of the many ways that Wharton was treated differently from the other authors featured in this volume. She was born into one of New York’s most esteemed families, and although her parents actively obstructed her desire to write, and she was not acquainted with any writers apart from Paul Bourget and Walter Berry until after the publication of her first story collection, the family name helped her gain access to a transatlantic network of writers and artists. 2 The British publisher with whom she worked for the longest (between 1903 and 1923), Frederick Macmillan, son of one of the founders of the Macmillan house, married an American lady from an established Long Island family and so was a social equal with Wharton. 3 Although Wharton dealt with her American publishers through agents, she dealt with Frederick Macmillan directly.4 These connections might raise questions about the objectivity of the reviews discussed in this chapter: many of them might have been written by people Wharton met at dinner parties. This should refine the way one thinks of the concept of a “British” reception that is at far removed from the author herself. The discussion nevertheless illustrates that Wharton still received bracing reviews. The newspaper reviews often preceded those written by the likes of Meynell or Lubbock and linked her writing to women and the sex relation all the more strongly.

Wharton’s Short Fictions of Modern Life Wharton was not always known as a satirist of Old New York. Before Wharton completed The House of Mirth, the novel which established this particular reputation, she had published three short story collections,

The Customs of that Other Country  161 two novellas, one novel, three books on architecture or design, and a translation of a play.5 These books established Wharton’s reputation as a short story writer whose works were “modern” in subject and form. When reviewers called her work “modern,” they generally meant that it exhibited psychological realism, or featured characters who were socially and geographically mobile, or dealt with the moral dilemmas created by new developments in modern life, like extravagant wealth or the relation between men and women, or dealt with these moral dilemmas with a moral message that was diffuse. Wharton’s first short story collection, The Greater Inclination, was published by Scribner’s in New York in March 1899, and Scribner’s shipped unbound sheets to John Lane in London to publish their printing, which appeared in newspaper offices in June 1899.6 As scholars have noted, until 1905, a recurring theme in the British and American reviews is whether Wharton was a disciple of Henry James or someone who improved on his model by returning to the lucid representations of cosmopolitan life of his early phase.7 However, other themes emerge in these early reviews. They praise her psychological insight, her extensive knowledge of life, and her delicate craftsmanship. The term “delicate” did not seem to have a negative valence until 1904. For example, the Scotsman praised her ability to put men and women in situations that reveal their true characters. The paper illustrated this point by explaining how in “A Muse’s Tragedy” the wife of a Harvard genius admits to the man writing a biography of the genius how lonely her life was and in “A Cup of Cold Water,” a bank cashier embezzles funds to impress a society girl, before meeting a young wife contemplating suicide because she was abandoned by the lover with whom she ran away. While such lively premises are interesting, the Scotsman reviewer assures readers, what really grips the reader is the author’s ability to “subtly analys[e] the mental states of the characters.”8 Modern situations, then, demanded psychological realism. Nearly all the Greater Inclination reviews highlighted the book’s “American savour.”9 The Western Morning News (Devon) noted that “A Cup of Cold Water” and “The Portrait” provide glimpses of the “feverish, money-getting life of sections of American society.”10 The Western Morning News opened by identifying the American talent for short story writing: American writers have made the short story the form of some of their best literary work. Quickness of perception, subtlety of analysis, and the power to suggest, if not to describe in detail, strong and dramatic situations are peculiarly products of the other side of the Atlantic. We find all these excellencies in this book of short stories by Edith Wharton. (6)

162  The Customs of that Other Country Continuing, the review explained that Wharton’s stories would not appeal to short story readers who were looking for sensation but to those who “appreciate psychological insight, bright dialogue, and delicate workmanship” (6). Some of the reviews in the national weeklies or monthlies opened with barbed expressions of surprise that American literature could be so good. The Saturday Review praised Wharton’s “mastery of language” and declared her a cut above most novel writers.11 The Athenaeum saved its sting for last: Miss Wharton has the further merit that, though presumably an American herself and writing of American men and women, she yet has a command of good English, and her nationality merely serves to add an alertness to her style which is usually lacking in this particular form of literature.12 The Athenaeum reviewer was one of few to hazard a guess as to what Wharton’s elliptical title refers to, deciding that “the reader is, on the whole, left to decide for himself whether ‘the greater inclination’ be towards honesty or the reverse, and he will probably decide in favour of the former” (23). The Athenaeum’s readers might well have felt that humankind’s greater inclination lies toward honesty if they were resistant to some of the new tenets of literary realism and naturalism as these related genres were being developed in the 1880s and 1890s. Realist fiction writers were no longer supposed to guide their readers to the proper moral behavior. While mid-century readers read for the author as part of a culture that valued individual character and a stable sense of the self and the world, realist fiction writers effaced themselves from their texts and conceived of literary authorship as an impersonal type of authority, like history, ethnography, social theory, or medicine.13 Ideally, that is, a realist text is conceived “as a window that would open onto reality without the mediation of an authorial ‘personality’” as Barbara Hochman puts it.14 We have seen the beginning of this conception of fiction as a clear window into American life in the responses to Phelps’s The Silent Partner, where reviewers expected an accurate assessment of American manufacturing in addition to the moral guardianship that Phelps was still interested in offering. As Hochman also makes clear, many readers were slow to make the change—many of them enjoyed popular novels whose narrators continued to speak to the reader in a “friendly” manner. As realism evolved into naturalism, as authors scrutinized the sordid, violent, and sexual dimensions of reality, as feminist writers questioned whether respectable people could seek sexual pleasure, as capitalism created large gaps between rich and poor, and as the complexity of finance meant people lived in a society of credit and transactions rather than a society of hard work and delayed gratification, authors increasingly did not know what the proper moral answers to the questions their fictions

The Customs of that Other Country  163 raised should be.15 Wharton questions conventional morality in the stories of The Greater Inclination, where Lydia tries to explain to Gannett in “Souls Belated” why a hasty marriage will grant them neither happiness nor legitimacy, and Woburn of “A Cup of Cold Water” decides not to run away from his own embezzlement after hearing the sorry story of the young wife from Detroit. Wharton would continue to write fictions about the difficulty of forging a moral path through modern life, and reviewers would continue to urge her to find reassuring answers to modern questions. Wharton, then, challenged reviewers’ understanding of morality and hence helped shape the advent of modern fiction. Reviewers’ responses bring forward for twenty-first-century readers the complexity of Wharton’s work. Wharton’s next piece of fiction was The Touchstone (1900), a novella published in Britain by John Murray as A Gift from the Grave.16 The Touchstone tells the story of Stephen Glennard, who betrays his former lover, the famous novelist Margaret Aubyn, by selling her letters to a biographer to raise enough money to marry Alexa Trent. The small number of British reviewers (nine were located on the databases) all agreed that despite its unfortunate English title, it was “neither sepulchral nor sensational.”17 The Manchester Courier said that its distinctiveness lies in “analysis of character, subtle and convincing.”18 Most reviewers reacted strongly to the novella’s moral issues and approved of the craft with which Wharton guided readers to the correct moral conclusion; of the morality of publishing private letters, the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent praised Wharton for presenting “the question . . . in a way which leaves no room for any but the prohibitive answer she gives it,”19 and the Athenaeum was relieved that it “involves a question of moral conduct rather than one of merely good or bad taste.”20 Even more markedly than reviews of The Greater Inclination, reviews of The Touchstone considered the moral conundrums raised by modern love. Many reviewers in both the United States and Britain complained that the twist at the end in which Alexa Trent forgives Glennard was implausible and disappointing. The Dial felt that the ending offers Glennard too much moral regeneration given the heinousness of his act, and the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent concurred. 21 The London clubland paper, St. James’s Gazette, closed down the novella’s serious moral quandaries by praising the exceptional morals of the women in Glennard’s life; Alexa Trent is “a fine creature, finely drawn,” while Margaret Aubyn’s “gift from the grave” is the gift of “a higher, finer nature.”22 The double standard of morality, in which only women are expected to be chaste and self-sacrificing, was a familiar flaw in morality as it was conventionally conceived. Yet, the St. James’s Gazette reviewer responded by reinvoking the double standard. It was clear that reviewers associated Wharton with highly polished tales of modern life, and they expected to be challenged by the moral conundrums her texts raised.

164  The Customs of that Other Country

Novellas, Long Short Stories, and Transatlantic Publishing Reviewers were concerned not only with Wharton’s refusal to moralize openly; they were also confused by the strange lengths of Wharton’s fictions. Publishing short story collections seemed risky enough in the 1890s. Wharton also inserted some long short stories into her story collections, she published several novellas, and some of her “fulllength” novels struck reviewers as inadequately unified. The lengths of Wharton’s fictions are a continual theme in the reviews as well as in her correspondence with Macmillan. In this story, we see the reciprocal influences of commerce and aesthetics. When The Touchstone came out, reviewers in both countries complained that the book had only as much substance as some of her stories but was an extra 100 pages long. Aline Gorren in the New York Critic wrote, “The Touchstone is a short novel, but its substance and method are only an extension of the substance and method of Mrs. Wharton’s short stories.”23 In the same month (August 1900), the Scotsman newspaper referred to the novella as “a short story.”24 The other reviewers who complained about the unsatisfactory nature of this novella’s ending responded to the novella’s abrupt conclusion. When Alexa explains to Glennard that Aubyn’s true gift to him was not her profitable letters but himself—that he’s “never before been what she thought [him], and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made [him] into the man she loved?”— she implies that she will stay with Stephen and forgive his crime against Aubyn. 25 A mere 42 words later, the novella ends. The abruptness of the conclusion does not arise from Wharton turning away from moral complexities; it is a hint that the moral complexities are difficult to resolve. When Crucial Instances (1901) was published, one reviewer noted that the stories might more rightfully be called novels. 26 With The Valley of Decision (1902), Wharton offered the critics a full-length novel that should have assured her a place among serious fiction writers, but reviews were mixed. The novel is a philosophical and social rumination about revolutionary ideas filtering into late eighteenth-century Italy. Many British reviewers liked it, yet the established bodies of British critical opinion on American fiction complained about the novel’s pacing. “[L]et Miss Wharton return to her delicate modern situations and stories,” suggested the Academy, “It is hardly rash to say that therein lies her truest talent.”27 The Saturday Review found the novel “uneven” and found her style incapable of keeping the reader absorbed though the book’s “inordinate length,” and the Athenaeum found the “laboured” manner meant that the novel required determination; although determination paid off, “[t]he exact and somewhat alarming number of the pages is six hundred and fifty.”28 Following soon after

The Customs of that Other Country  165 was The Descent of Man and Other Stories, and reviewers continued to mull over what the Sheffield Independent called “one characteristic of the American short story writer well developed, namely, that tendency to bring a narrative to an abnormally abrupt conclusion.”29 In her attempts to avoid moralizing, the reviewer continued, “she sometimes misses finishing the tale.” The length of Wharton’s books and the resultant difficulty of attaining good sales in England was a continual theme in her correspondence with Frederick Macmillan. In June 1903, Wharton asked Macmillan if he wanted the English rights to her new short novel Sanctuary. 30 Macmillan replied that he would publish the book, writing, “We should certainly like to publish it in England, though I am sorry to say that little books of this size do not as a rule prove very successful in this market.”31 He suggested a 3s 6d volume. Wharton sounded reluctant to accept the prospect of less money from a cheaper volume, responding, “I know that stories of that length have, for some inscrutable reason, a smaller market in England than here, though in ‘A Gift from the Grave’ I had my first success with English readers.”32 When Sanctuary failed to garner the sales she wished for, she was grateful to Macmillan for agreeing to publish her story collection The Descent of Man and Other Stories. The story collection seemed substantial enough to Wharton, who wrote, “as this will no doubt be a 6/ [six shilling] book the British public will perhaps buy instead of only praising it!”33 The next three months saw many letters over the length of the story collection and its profitability. Scribner and Macmillan had varying ideas of the appropriate length. Scribner initially omitted one story that was late in reaching him then decided to exclude two stories to limit the volume to a manageable 75,000 words. 34 Hearing this news through Wharton, Macmillan promptly replied, “In this country people consider that 75,000 words for six shillings is very short measure” and requested that she include the two extra stories in the English edition. 35 Wharton replied that the Scribner editor William Crary Brownell had said that more than 75,000 words in a story collection would be “wasteful.”36 Macmillan assured her that the matter was of no great importance except for sales, because English book-buyers have taken to complaining that six shilling novels “do not always contain as much matter as they would like to have.”37 Wharton responded saying that she has not yet written the two stories in question, so the volume should not wait for them. 38 Yet a few days later, she sent a copy of “The Letter,” the story which Scribner had forgotten to include in the New York edition, and Macmillan quickly arranged to include the story in the English edition. “The Letter” features a lost and found letter revealing the heroism of an Italian liberal hung during the Risorgimento; the story makes the Macmillan edition of The Descent of Man and Other Stories more

166  The Customs of that Other Country cosmopolitan. It adds not only to the form of the collection but also its thematics. The House of Mirth met these wide-ranging expectations about sales. Frederick Macmillan wrote, “I am in hope that a long novel by you may do better in the way of sale here than either of the books by you that we have published.”39 The novel sold very well—nearly 8,000 copies of the British and colonial editions were sold in the first nine months—yet because ten times more were sold in the United States over the same period, Wharton was unsatisfied.40 Despite her complaints, Macmillan did advertise widely, and the terms that the Macmillan house used were striking (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1  Ad for The House of Mirth, Scotsman, 5 February 1906, 2.  This is copyright of The Scotsman Publications and is being used with their kind permission for this purpose only.

The Customs of that Other Country  167 Wharton had finally written the “great American novel,” that elusive book about which reviewers continue to dream. Paradoxically, the Americanness and greatness of the novel arose in part in order to please a British market intent on longer fictions about modern American life. Critics of The House of Mirth in both Britain and the United States largely concurred with Macmillan’s estimation that she had successfully reached a watershed moment, and Wharton’s friends wrote her congratulatory letters.41 British reviewers and the public in a reciprocal relationship with them certainly influenced the form and thematic range of Wharton’s fiction.

Wharton’s Great American Novels and Other Masterworks Nearly all the 16 British reviews of The House of Mirth that I have located hail the book as an important contribution to the study of high society, as good in its way as William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) or his Pendennis novels (1848–1850, 1855, 1862), George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), or Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler (1891). The novel’s ambiguity worked well on these reviewers; they debated the moral status and mysterious interiority of Lily’s acquaintances and of Lily herself as avidly as any of the twenty-first-century students I have taught, demonstrating that modern views of subjectivity were gestating. The Spectator sympathized with Lily’s anti-Semitism when it remarked that the supreme humiliation of stooping to “the odious Mr. Rosedale” and then being rejected was “almost unbearably painful” to read.42 The Graphic commented that a perverse fate insists on Lily appearing in the worst possible light before the one man for whom she really cares, which it assumes is Selden.43 The Times Literary Supplement preferred Rosedale to Selden: Rosedale, the Jew millionaire, who knows the place in society that he wants, knows exactly what it is worth to pay it, and is prepared to pay for it, who with all his meanness gets somehow to the heart of life, touches reality in a way in which the Seldens of the world, who are worse egotists than the Rosedales, will never do.44 This reviewer was one of few to find comedy as well as tragedy and irony: her work has “the real spirit of comedy, watchful, sympathetic, and ironic too” (116). Unaccustomed to reading modern novels with unknowable characters, the Speaker identified the ambiguity of Wharton’s characters as a fault. If Selden is as penetrating and clever as he is said to be, why does he fade into the background, the reviewer wondered. If Lily is as clever as she is meant to be, would she not have realized where the money came from that Gus Trenor gave her?45

168  The Customs of that Other Country Writing for the Bookman, Alice Meynell, however, preferred Selden to Rosedale, and she urged Wharton to be less diffuse, more sympathetic, and more of a guardian figure. Meynell, known as a female aesthete with diffuse and subtle feminism, was one of the great reviewers of the age.46 Meynell opens with a declaration about Wharton’s closet moralism: Mrs. Wharton is essentially a moralist, albeit with the whole modern resolve not to declare herself. A Gift from the Grave remains her highest, most complete, and most commanding work, because, in a memorable passage she set her sail to a natural wind. Moral passion swept through the world of that book—direct grief, emotion close to the fact of life, love indignation, remorse, dishonour, and honour; all the storm of breasts complex, civilised, but incorrupt.47 Meynell depicts the moral writer as a writer who is less controlled, less fashionable, and it was certainly common for reviewers to fault Wharton for being too controlled, too clever, rather as James Ashcroft Noble faulted Sarah Orne Jewett for only occasionally “letting herself go with a passionate, almost lyrical abandonment.”48 Both Wharton and ­Jewett were praised for writing good English prose rather than American, but the control which they exhibited, that seemed so uncharacteristic of their nation, was also a source of disappointment. Meynell wished that Selden would serve as a better mouthpiece for the author than he actually is, and complained about the novel’s modern diffuseness (as did, for that matter, the Manchester Courier).49 Meynell wished that Wharton would write like Thackeray, who allowed his moralism a mouthpiece in his character Laura Pendennis. “And in this extremity of reserve lurks the one fault of art in the book—that is the indefiniteness of the ‘better part’ which Selden has to offer to the self-­loving and money-loving heroine” (125). When Lily refuses to follow Selden into his vague space of liberty, “She is less to blame than Mrs. Wharton” (125). This is a striking comment because it is far more definite than most reviews, which err in the direction of caution. Rosedale, Meynell wrote, was “an exceedingly vulgar Jew” (126). Unusually among critics, she faults Wharton for not building a sense of female solidarity. The two nice female characters who help Lily at the end do not fare well in the reader’s eyes, Meynell writes. Because Wharton is a “sequestered moralist,” she made Gerty Farish, the poor cousin, “dowdy” (the review does not make clear why a moralist would make the supportive friend dowdy), and she gave Nettie Struther, the working girl, a “fall” in her past (126). (The Saturday Review also noted acerbically that only the “one kind ugly woman friend” would stick with a woman through good report and ill in all literature.)50 In closing, Meynell writes, “It is the mode this year; next year, in a decade of years, it will not be the mode, so to hide a heart of emotion and of dignity” (126). Meynell’s review

The Customs of that Other Country  169 illustrates that women reviewed women and that the presence of women reviewers and writers (as well as readers) meant that criticism overall changed, if rather subtly, as reviewers had to consider female friendship as well as heterosexual marital prospects and moral compasses as well as biting satire. Wharton’s work contributed to this change. As Shari Benstock has put it, “British reviewers . . . did not doubt her portrait of New York society (one suspects a certain gleefulness in their readiness to condemn American crassness).”51 The gleefulness is especially strong in the London weeklies. The Times Literary Supplement wrote, “Mrs. Wharton knows through and through the extremely modern types which she chooses. She registers to the last degree of delicacy the jumble of crudity and overcivilization which she finds in New York life of to-day.”52 The Saturday Review offered a bile-ridden assessment of American society women; it declared the novel a “masterly study of the modern American woman with her coldly corrupt nature and unhealthy charm.”53 The Speaker praised the novel for providing “a vigorous dressing down at Mrs. Wharton’s hands” of the “society of smart frivolous folk, luxurious pleasure-seekers, [and] unproductive idlers,” a society in stark contrast to the “manners, breeding, and intelligence being recognisably of that stamp which the best European society prizes.”54 Rather different from Benstock’s diagnosis, however, reviewers were beginning to develop an air of knowingness about the promiscuous New York high society that differs radically from the rather gormless readings of American literary realism that they published only a few years earlier. Reviewers had long judged American realist and naturalist fiction to be a reliable window into various types of American life. As discussed in Chapter 3, Walter Besant heralded American regional fiction as an automatic response to demographic diversity only 12 years earlier. In writing this, Besant overlooked the craft of the writer in shaping a fiction that readers would read as a reliable window into life. Other reviewers pointed out that writers like Mary Wilkins or Sarah Orne Jewett wrote such characteristically New England fiction because they were good at characterization and observation, they had an ear for dialogue, they wrote economically, and the structure of their fictions perfectly fit the subject matter.55 By 1905, reviewers widely conceded that the Americanness of a novel was down to the writer’s craft as well as her personal authority or experience. Perhaps because Wharton was already considered such a master of the craft of fiction, she was granted authority over her subject matter, the likes of which Freeman or Phelps never enjoyed. “[O]ne cannot help feeling that the author knows, that her characters are sketched from life, and that the Trenors, the George Dorsets, and the Van Osburghs are very unpleasantly real people,” wrote the Publishers’ Circular.56 Part of what was happening in these reviews is that reviewers were likely

170  The Customs of that Other Country more knowledgeable about New York than they were about New England towns. Part of what was happening is that the reviewers were growing more sophisticated in their readings of realist and naturalist forms. “This picture may or may not be overdrawn,” wrote the Speaker’s reviewer of The House of Mirth, showing the caution of a scientist rather than the fevered fantasies of a tourist.57 The London Bookman graciously noted that American critics were currently divided over the book’s accuracy about New York society.58 By the 1900s, reviewers were more sophisticated about not only realist form but also transatlantic scandal. British reviewers delighted in American novels that portrayed American life in distorted and exaggerated ways, that played up the “absurdity and vitality” of American life while contrasting it to the “greatness and stasis” of British life.59 By the 1890s, everyone from American writers trying to make it in London like Gertrude Atherton or Harold Frederic to publishers like John Murray and Frederick Macmillan recognized this phenomenon. It was, of course, not only a marketing tool, but also a structure of feeling, an expression of how the two nations had developed “not so much in opposition but rather as heretical alternatives to each other.”60 The increasing sophistication of British reviewers about the truth value of novelistic depictions of the absurdity and vitality of American life became especially evident in the reviews of The Custom of the Country. Wharton herself played into this split between the absurdity and vitality of American life and the greatness and stasis of British life: she identified the novel as the one that would meet British critical and popular expectations by slipping London into the précis for Macmillan: It is called ‘The Custom of the Country’, & deals with the meteoric flight of a young woman who begins her career in a small Western town, & passing through New York & Paris, has her eyes on London when the story ends.61 The novel did sell well in Britain, and both British and American reviewers duly expressed a shared horror of the antics of Undine Spragg. Once most of the reviews were out in both countries, the American critic and professor of history and economics F.M. Colby, writing in the North American Review, defended the American wife from her foreign detractors, particularly those who write for the British weekly magazines that feature so heavily in this book. After quoting the Marquis de Chelles’ memorable tirade over Undine’s sale of his tapestries, Colby quips Who but a Sunday editor, undoubtedly the most easily startled of human beings, could feel the least surprise at this steady damnation of the American wife, whether by foreign observer or by native novelist? Take, for example, the British weekly magazines. Years

The Customs of that Other Country  171 ago they formed the habit of exposing her and they would no more dream of leaving off now than of omitting the article on “What the Birds Are Doing in Devonshire.” Time and again they have burst out upon the American woman all at once, as when one Dr. Andrew McPnail, some three years ago, called her a Hanoverian rat, a San José scale, a noxious weed, a jade, a giantess, and a potato-bug, and was immediately copied approvingly by the other British magazines, and widely quoted on the Continent.62 Colby aptly describes how transatlantic scandals are produced: Anglophilic American writers and British reviewers conspire to produce an image of an American fall from a European ideal that is expressed in one venue and thereafter copied, turning press diversity into an echo chamber. British culture is not held up to the same high standard of criticism but rather subjected to rose-colored discussions of flora and fauna. Despite the criticism’s shop-worn content, the case at hand is presented as new, topical, and urgent. The criticism is reprinted widely. Clearly, transatlantic scandal was grease in the gears of presses across the ­Atlantic world. Despite Colby’s characterization of them, British reviewers of The Custom of the Country had not appeared “easily startled” when their reviews came out a few weeks earlier. As with most Wharton volumes, they found her subject matter to be a familiar ingredient redeemed by an exemplary style. The Glasgow Herald declared that while Lily Bart’s tragedy was that she was too good for her society, Undine’s tragedy was that she was perfectly suited to her own. Both the Glasgow Herald and the Athenaeum sounded fascinated and repelled by her “American feminine arrogance.” This was the Herald’s phrase; the Athenaeum’s words were “The modern American young woman, with her wondrous self-­ assurance, her arrogance toward the male creatures who support her, and her physical perfections,” interestingly invoking the same word that José Martí used to describe Ramona in the introduction to his translation of the novel (he called the character “the arrogant mestiza”).63 The Glasgow Herald’s review appeared the day the novel was announced in the Publisher’s Circular, and it set the tone for other reviewers when it declared that the novel “excites as profound and unflagging an interest as The House of Mirth” and praised its perfect evocation of both American society and “the blank wall of French aristocratic tradition.”64 In closing, the Glasgow Herald quipped, “Meanwhile the European reader is left in a state of perhaps illusory thankfulness that passionless, capricious, and ignorant monsters like Undine are as yet confined to the country that deliberately engenders them.”65 The reference to the “European” reader sidesteps the question of Scottishness or Englishness in favor of a cosmopolitan conglomerate; the reviewer reinforces transatlantic divisions even as he flounders with national ones. The Saturday

172  The Customs of that Other Country Review’s opinion was similar, inspiring a defense from a reader who claimed knowledge of how woefully curtailed the young American wives are by law and custom.66 F.M. Colby had a point, however, in that the British press did diverge from the American press. British reviewers argued that the novel was not about the American wife but about American divorce laws, and they were indeed more shocked by those than the Americans had been. Daily newspapers identified its subject matter as “the speediness of American divorce”67 albeit told in an unsensational way typical of this quality author,68 and in the Academy, one of the few fully negative reviews the novel received was given a special headline about divorce, in a large font size, atypical for this weekly (see Figure 6.2). The review faults the novel for having too much “purpose,” which “very nearly overrides the story itself, which in a novel is an error.” This message is “to show the horribleness and evils of the diabolical system allowed by some of the American States,” and the reviewer points the ultimate finger not at the American wife but at her society: it “seems almost incredible that any society could make even an American woman so heartless.”69 It was easier for the British reviewers than for their American counterparts to stand wholly outside of the consumer society of the novel and reject it comprehensively. Amy L. Blair has demonstrated that American middle-class readers responded to The House of Mirth by cheering on Lily in her attempt to climb the social ladder, suggesting that they read into the strongly critical novel a palatable version of American society in which even lowlier classes might aspire to high society.70 A similar phenomenon appears in the American reviews of The Custom of the Country as represented in Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews. In Colby’s case and in others, rather than decrying Undine Spragg as a selfish social climber, they defend her as an ordinary American wife or what the Nation called “the spending American woman.”71 The Nation even invented a history that justified the spending American woman; American women toiled so continuously on the frontier that their men folk believed it to be only fair to grant them their every desire.72 The Academy review of the novel is in contrast to this analysis, as is the comment in the Athenaeum, which declared the novel’s society to be “as chaotic, crude, and purely imitative as that of Hayti or Liberia.”73 In a biting reference to the imperialist American foreign policy of the day, the Manchester Courier wrote that Undine “annexed” Ralph Marvell, her second and most victimized husband.74 “She has not a single redeeming moral feature,” wrote the Saturday Review, and the novel “should be read as a parable.”75 There were significant differences, then, between British and American reviewers: the British were more detached from American society and found it easier to condemn and reject, even as they had grown sophisticated about hiding their indignation.

Figure 6.2  “Fiction—American Divorce.” Review of The Custom of the Country, Academy, 29 November 1913, 689.  Image copyright British Library Board, General Reference Collection 1910–1915 LOU.LD64.

174  The Customs of that Other Country By the 1920s, as Lyn Bennett has argued, critics faulted Wharton for being what Vernon Parrington in 1921 called a “literary aristocrat.” While great fiction writers were no longer encouraged to be a friendly guardian to their readers, their authorial presence should be felt in subtler ways, and Wharton’s authorial presence seemed too “inextricable from the material culture about which she famously wrote.”76 It is certainly true that the reviewers tended to circumscribe Wharton’s depth and range by reading each new volume for the subject matter and form they assumed to be the most characteristic of this author; that is the conservative bent of all reviews, and it plagued both Freeman and Wharton. Bennett’s judgments ring truer, however, for the 1920s than they do for the period between 1899 and 1917. Before the 1920s, the reviewers judged Wharton’s authorial presence vis-à-vis the topics of her volumes to be very successfully managed. Undine Spragg, the Saturday Review wrote, “may be regarded as symbolic of a certain type of American woman whom Mrs. Wharton desires to hold up to scorn and reprobation.”77 The remark suggests that Wharton is not of the milieu she describes; Undine is not a stand-in for the author, and the finely realized novel is by no means thinly veiled autobiography. Henry James’s praise was the most superlative. Writing for the Times Literary Supplement, he judged the “saturation” of her fiction superior to that of other novelist because she turns social observation into imagery, she encourages “her expression to flower into some sharp image or figure of her thought when that will make the thought more finely touch us.” Praising her “asperity” with “the old sentimental and romantic values” he considers her talent to be “rare” because it successfully combines masculine and feminine strengths.78 Although some British reviewers were beginning to circumscribe Wharton into the somewhat narrow domain of old New York, other reviewers identified her as a writer of unusual versatility. Most granted her full authority over France and Italy. The Saturday Review’s review of The Valley of Decision praised her local color, enjoying the novel’s imitation of a fragment from Arthur Young’s diary, Travels in France (1792), but it complained about her knowledge of the priestly order, saying that she confused friars, monks, and Barnabites, which prompted the reviewer to “question the truth of the atmosphere of scandal and tittle tattle with which her clergy are invested.”79 The reviewer’s questions about her factual knowledge are surely bound up with his or her belief that most eighteenth-century Italians were content with their lives and that the novel needed “more light” and “less shade.” When reviewing Italian Villas and Their Gardens, the Speaker called the book a “good example of the thoroughness and intelligence often now to be found in the work of American women.”80 Her books drawing on her experiences on the French front in the Great War, the non-fiction Fighting France (Macmillan 1916), and the novella The Marne (Macmillan 1919) were

The Customs of that Other Country  175 received with admiration and respect from both British and American reviewers.81 It is utterly clear that most British reviewers conceived of their own countrymen as belated and provincial vis-à-vis France and Italy. Reviewers up until the War also granted Wharton full authority to meditate over a wide portion of the social class system.82 When reviewing The Fruit of the Tree (1907), with its discussion of factory life in New England and Progressive reforms to improve the conditions for workers, the Athenaeum praised Wharton’s move into a subject matter of wider interest, although it expressed some surprise that conditions were as bad as all that in American factories.83 The Academy reviewer praised Wharton’s “neat and effective thumb-nail sketches of American society, drawn with the sure knowledge that comes from intimate acquaintances with the originals.”84 Although the Saturday Review found Ethan Frome too bitter because Ethan and Mattie are not granted a merciful and novelistic early death, most British reviewers felt “she conveyed a sense of reality with her pictures of American rural life,” and the short novel was reviewed more widely than The Fruit of the Tree had been.85 The Manchester Courier praised Wharton’s depiction of the poor over those of other novelists, who treat the poor as heroic and dignified but ignore their poverty or refuse them any heroism.86 When Xingu and Other Stories (1916) appeared, many reviewers praised her evocation of the Bunner Sisters.87 The Times Literary Supplement admired her wit and knowledge, her ability to choose the perfect social and geographical climates for her appointed subjects, “with a reach as easy and a discrimination as assured for one as for another.”88 She was considered far more than a writer of the society novel. Reviewers liked her forays beyond Old New York. They began to accustom themselves to her realism, naturalism, and modernity. Her range and ability to expand beyond class boundaries redefined the bounds of women’s literature, too.

The Great War and the Survival of Women’s Literature Despite severe disruptions to British publishing during World War I, the success of Wharton’s story collection Xingu and Other Stories and her novel Summer suggested to many reviewers that her brand of clever, elusive women’s fiction would survive the war.89 Writers were at a loss when the Great War began, wrote the Aberdeen Journal in 1917. Women novelists “wondered if the welter would not engulf her special subject,” but by 1917, it became clear there was still interest in women’s fiction.90 Wharton was one of these “women’s” fiction writers; early reviewers treated Wharton as a woman author of feminine subject matter and did not consider this a liability. Their reading of Wharton as a women’s writer was more evident in the provincial daily newspapers than in the

176  The Customs of that Other Country London weeklies. When reviewing The Descent of Man and Other Stories, Bristol’s Western Daily Press wrote that she was never ashamed of being a woman, but rather “obviously delights in her sex, and throughout her writing displays her womanliness with charming delicacy.” It was just like a woman, continued the reviewer, to describe modern people whose lives are full of awkward circumstances. Her stories “are alive with her intellectual personality, they sparkle with woman’s wit, with a woman’s sly smile, and tears are to be found too, half mocking, half tender.” With the novelty of her plots, she has discovered that “the road to success is found in the flattery of the reader’s intelligence, which discovery is essentially feminine.”91 It has become evident in this chapter that the established weeklies the Saturday Review, the Academy, the Athenaeum, and the Spectator were growing staid and cautious; the Speaker had already been absorbed into the Athenaeum by 1907, and the Academy folded in 1915. The Athenaeum disliked Wharton’s forays into naturalist examinations of the animal side of human nature. The Saturday Review declined to review Wharton’s industrial novel, The Fruit of the Tree, even though it reviewed many American novels as a matter of course.92 The Athenaeum published only a perfunctory notice of Xingu and Other Stories.93 The Spectator began to prefer popular fiction to Wharton’s experimental work. When reviewing The Descent of Man and Other Stories, the Spectator praised Wharton’s “complete self-effacement of the author and the suppression of any obtrusive endeavour to edify the reader,” yet apologized for “a very old-fashioned curiosity on the part of the reader or reviewer” by bemoaning that “Mrs. Wharton is more than usually tantalising in her reticence as to ‘what became of’ the character in whom she had enlisted our interest.”94 British reviewers of Xingu and Other Stories diverged from the Americans because of their different experiences of the war. The American reviews collected in Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews sound disappointed that the stories seem to have been written before her war work in France, as indeed all but “Coming Home” were.95 The British welcome the diversion from wartime topics. This was especially true at the Spectator, which wrote that We confess to approaching the novels and stories of Mrs. Wharton with mingled emotions, in which a reverent admiration for her ability, her subtlety, and her artistic skill is tempered by the apprehensions—­ quite old-fashioned, we admit—that we must put away all expectations of happy endings or even Indian summers of long-deferred contentment. [. . .] The events of the last two years and a half have not been calculated to raise the spirits of any one who, like Mrs. Wharton, has had personal experience of the ravages of war—and, let us add, has shown a generous sympathy with the Allies—yet by

The Customs of that Other Country  177 a happy inconsistency she has placed in the forefront of her new volume a story not merely detached from all European convulsions but conceived and carried out in a spirit of satirical comedy.96 Wharton’s admirable work for the Allies in France was well known, widely reported in British newspapers. Here, the Spectator signals not only its own old-fashioned and unsophisticated penchant for the happy ending but also its war weariness. It is often said that British readings of American literature tolerate well-worn or dated themes like that of the Wild West in Bret Harte’s fiction longer than the Americans do because they are farther removed from the ever-changing reality.97 Here, the Americans were disappointed that Wharton did not evoke the war soon enough or obviously enough, while the British were relieved to find what the East Sussex Bexhill-on-Sea Observer called “a pleasant diversion.”98 The reviews of Summer illustrate all the more clearly the changes in the publishing and reviewing world. Many British papers, both high culture weeklies and daily newspapers, steered clear of the sexually illicit content of the novel. They used the novel’s regional setting as an excuse to focus on scenery and landscape rather than sexuality. As with David Douglas’s cover of Freeman’s A Humble Romance and Other Stories, which placed Sally and Jake within a landscape instead of focusing on their passion, reviewers downplayed the novel’s potential feminine and feminist content. Devon’s Western Times praised the descriptions of New England scenery, which were “very ably painted” and claimed that it was worth reading the book for that alone.99 Many papers, including the Review of Reviews, joined the Times Literary Supplement in focusing almost exclusively on her evocation of certain fine scenes, the excursion to a country town for the 4th of July celebration, the girl’s visit to the insinuating lady-doctor, the wild night piece of the funeral on the mountain.100 Arguing that the setting and story were clichéd material redeemed by the fine drama and the great craft, the review (which is probably by Percy Lubbock) praises the characterization of Charity as fully drawn, while the characterization of “the tarnished old man” Mr. Royall is unduly neglected, “he is a really rich piece of creation, a masterful louche, obscurely battered and defeated derelict of his world; he does not, one feels, get all the display he should have had.”101 Many papers rejected the sordid, sexual nature of the story and the popularity of the novelist. The Athenaeum granted the book only a short notice that dismissed the story and praised Wharton’s “refined and economic art.”102 The English Review, a magazine associated with new modernist writers, offered praise that served as condescension, not toward Wharton, but toward her character Charity. This is the idyll of “an unsophisticated—no, that is hardly the word, inexperienced rather—village girl” that is built into “a story of haunting insight and beauty” which will live in “the affectionate memory of all who can

178  The Customs of that Other Country appreciate a small thing exquisitely done.”103 The pithy cryptic style of reviewing makes it difficult to know whether the book is about a small thing because Charity’s case is so typical and unremarkable (hence condescending toward unwed mothers) or because Wharton’s novel is short or otherwise thin. The clubland vehicle, the Illustrated London News, wrote more clearly that “we protest against so much talent concentrated upon a sordid history,” meaning perhaps both the premarital sex and the grimness of the environment.104 The Cheshire Nantwich Guardian noted that the treatment was fine but the “theme sordid and hackneyed,” and condemned the book’s “nauseating insistence on the inevitableness of the girl’s betrayal, and the detailed accounts of her pregnancy.”105 Another magazine associated with modernism, the New Age, wrote a sarcastic review complaining that the novel was being treated like literature, even though it was published in September and reprinted three times before 1918, and “Literature does not sell like that on its merits as literature.” The magazine dismissed Charity as “the village wench” and moralized against her, but not Lucius Harney, by writing that marriage was simply a device for “preventing women from acquiring responsibility for their own conduct by relieving them of the consequences of their actions.”106 Writing for the Egoist, the modernist magazine that succeeded the New Freewoman, T.S. Eliot praised Wharton highly but fixed many of the stereotypes that continue to haunt the criticism of regionalism and American literary culture: The book is, in fact—or should be—the death-blow to a kind of novel which has flourished in New England, the novel in which the wind whistles through the stunted firs and over the granite boulders into the white farmhouse where pale gaunt women sew rag carpets.107 The poetry in the statement (the alliteration, the trimeter and tetrameter in the prepositional phrases) works to make the reviewer appear magisterial. What he is saying, that Jewett and Freeman’s New England writing is dead and devoid of experiment or new ideas in contradistinction to Edith Wharton, is currently in hot dispute among critics.108 Eliot also pronounces American culture to be incapable of handling such sensitive sexual material as the novel holds: “This novel will certainly be considered ‘disgusting’ in America; it is certain that not one reader in a thousand will apprehend the author’s point of view” (263). A modernist sense of the relation between text and reader has been formed, in which the text must hold secrets which only a discerning reader can decode. The majority of readers are derided as ignorant prudes, especially if they are American.

The Customs of that Other Country  179 Other reviewers broke from the mold by focusing directly on sexuality. As such, they reshaped the terms of the debate surrounding the prudery of American culture that Eliot captured so memorably. Francis Hackett, writing for the American New Republic, mourned “that sexual limbo which rewards New England virtue” rather than the lawlessness of the mountain with which Charity’s sexual desire is associated.109 Yet, he accused Mrs. Wharton of going “slumming among souls,” of not taking Charity’s loss of hope seriously or sympathetically enough (251). Hackett felt that there was something false about the book because of the speed with which Wharton hurries over “the poignancy of a human record to arrive at a cruel predicament” (250). Unlike Percy Lubbock in the Times Literary Supplement, Hackett felt that this was Charity’s story, and he mourned that Charity was “nothing to her author . . . merely a creature to be substantiated in detail in order that a dramatic sensation can be properly pulled off” (250). Wharton treated too perfunctorily those situations that most ask the readers to put themselves in Charity’s place, such as when Charity overhears Mr. Royall telling Harney that she is the daughter of a drunken convict and a woman who was happy to give her up: This is a curiously superficial and mechanical account of a heroine’s crisis. Girls do moan to their pillows, of course, and lie disordered far into the night. But assassination of a hope would create a more bitter fever than this. (251) Hackett was a critic and novelist who was born in Ireland and moved to the United States in 1901. Music and art critic Lawrence Gilman writing for the North American Review declared that though the book seems to be on a clichéd topic, Wharton takes a giant step forward in American fiction, catching up with Shaw’s theatre, by avoiding the “degrading myth of woman’s sexual imbecility” and asserting that girls want sex.110 Gilman approvingly quotes Wharton’s glowing description of how good Harney makes Charity feel in the cabin, when the only reality was the wondrous unfolding of her new self, the reaching out to the light of all her contracted tendrils. . . . She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air. (Wharton qtd. in Gilman, 259) Although many reviewers, following convention, avoid discussing the ending, Gilman felt that Wharton’s terrible ending for Charity, “long anonymous years of kindly and terrible amelioration stretching vacantly

180  The Customs of that Other Country before her” was true to Wharton’s determination to denote a social condition, a social reality of conventional American morality (259). More furtively, some British critics agreed that Wharton’s book was not hackneyed but a bold, sympathetic exploration of female sexuality. The Conservative paper the Yorkshire Post praised Wharton’s ability to write sympathetically and knowledgeably about simple people. The paper found Charity “curiously attractive” and predicted that readers “will follow the fortunes of this girl of unfortunate parentage with the close interest of intimate friendship.”111 The Saturday Review was deeply sympathetic to Charity; her love affair was “unfortunate, but it is not allowed to ruin her life.”112 Whether a reader agrees that marrying Mr.  Royall does not ruin Charity’s life, it is still commendable to see the Saturday Review allowing pre-marital sex for girls: “It is a woman’s story told with sympathetic simplicity by a woman and an artist—a book to buy and keep,” the periodical averred.113 All these reviewers engage in the feminist literary criticism that Molly Youngkin identifies most specifically with the woman’s press periodicals of Shafts and The Woman’s Herald. By 1917, this special form of literary criticism had grown more diffuse among the periodicals. Wharton’s books gave nascent feminist critics something to read.

Conclusion Around the years of World War I, critics began to turn to the question of the legacy of Wharton and other writers for women. As we have seen, some critics were happy to class Wharton as merely a popular author, particularly some of those writing for the periodicals associated with modernism. Others disagreed. Writing for the Sketch, as reported in the Gloucestershire Chronicle, Ella Hepworth Dixon, a New Woman novelist and daughter of one of the editors of the Athenaeum, complained that serious papers devoted pages of criticism to contemporary novelists, even young and minor ones, so long as they were men. Women of the day were ignored unless they had been dead for 30 years. Critics wrote panegyrics of Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot, but they ignored good contemporary writers like May Sinclair, Edith Wharton, and the Countess von Arnim, who all should be considered part of “English literature.”114 Indeed, as Chapter 1 of this book makes clear, Wharton’s titles were readily available both in the public library and the subscription library of Nottingham as they appeared in print, so it seems that Dixon’s wishes were eventually granted. Wharton came onto the scene with a great deal of cultural capital, and her works were treated with critical kid gloves from the start, which makes her reception unlike the reception of many of the authors featured in this book. She was considered a master craftsman and a reliable and exciting chronicler of everything that was modern in American life. British reviewers stood further back from American society than their American counterparts

The Customs of that Other Country  181 and roundly condemned the money grubbing qualities of American women. At the same time, the British reviews reveal new sophistication about realist and naturalist fiction forms. Wharton had a strong legacy in Britain: her work accustomed critics to realist detachment, naturalist grimness, modernist unknowability, and feminist aesthetics. Edith Wharton, British editions and reviews*

The Greater Inclination British Edition John Lane, 1899. British Reviews “Fiction.” Dundee Advertiser. 22 June 1899, 2. “Fiction.” Scotsman. 29 June 1899, 2–3. Western Morning News (Devon). 7 July 1899, 6. Academy, 8 July 1899, 40. B. Rouser. “Letters of a Book-Taster.” Outlook. 15 July 1899, 777–8. Saturday Review. 15 July 1899, 82. “New Books of the Week.” Glasgow Herald. 20 July 1899, 9. Athenaeum. 5 August 1899, 189. “Our Library Table.” Bristol Mercury. 4 September 1899, 2. “The Literary Week.” Academy. 20 January 1900, 43–46.

The Touchstone/A Gift from the Grave British Edition John Murray, 1900 British Reviews “News Notes.” Bookman. May 1900, 35–37. Scotsman. 6 August 1900, 2. Manchester Courier. 8 August 1900, 2. “Ethics of Love Literature.” Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 10 August 1900, 2. “The Sale of a Soul.” Outlook. 11 August 1900, 56. Athenaeum. 18 August 1900, 210. Bookman. September 1900, 189. * Most of these periodicals are on the databases British Periodicals, British Newspapers, British Newspaper Archive, or the Modernist Journals Project. Titles of reviews are listed only if they are different from the title of the book.

182  The Customs of that Other Country St. James’s Gazette (London). 23 August 1900, 5. Academy. 1 September 1900, 173–4. Illustrated London News. 8 September 1900, 9.

The House of Mirth British Edition Macmillan, 1905. British Reviews Spectator. 28 October 1905, 657. Reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 113. Academy. 4 November 1905, 1155. “Novels and Stories.” Glasgow Herald. 6 November 1905, 4. “Reviewer’s Column.” Leeds Mercury. 7 November 1905, 7. “New Novels.” Manchester Courier. 7 November 1905, 3. “Literature.” Western Daily Press (Bristol). 20 November 1905, 3. Graphic. 25 November 1905, 28. Athenaeum. 25 November 1905, 718. Reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 114. Publishers’ Circular. 25 November 1905, 617. “Fiction: The House of Mirth.” Times Literary Supplement. 1 December 1905, 421, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 116–17. “Fiction.” Speaker. 16 December 1905, 286. Alice Meynell. “The House of Mirth.” Bookman. 29 December 1905, 130–1, reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, 124–5. “News Notes.” Bookman. January 1906, 147–50. “Literary Notes.” North Devon Journal. 8 February 1906, 2. Stamford Mercury (Lincolnshire). 23 February 1906, 7. Saturday Review. 17 February 1906, 209–10, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 129–30. “Recent Literature.” London Quarterly Review. April 1906, 358–61.

The Fruit of the Tree British Edition Macmillan, 1907. British Reviews “New Novels.” Manchester Courier. 13 December 1907, 10. “Book Chat.” Cheltenham Chronicle. 14 December 1907, 2.

The Customs of that Other Country  183 Athenaeum, 14 December 1907, 762, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 152. “Literature.” Western Daily Press. 23 December 1907, 7. Academy. 11 January 1908, 345.

Ethan Frome British Edition Macmillan, 1911 British Reviews “Literature.” Bury Free Press (Suffolk). 28 October 1911, 2. English Review, November 1911, 733. Manchester Courier, 17 November 1911, 10. Saturday Review, 18 November 1911, 650, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 185. “Literature.” Glasgow Herald. 24 November 1911, 13. Academy. 2 December 1911, 700–1. Walsall Advertiser (West Midlands). 9 December 1911, 3. London Daily News, 18 December 1911, 4. “Literary Notes.” Western Daily Press. 27 January 1912, 8. Bookman, January 1912, 216, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 186–7. English Review, January 1912, 364–5.

The Custom of the Country British Edition Macmillan, 1913. British Reviews “New Novels.” Glasgow Herald. 13 November 1913, 10. “The Ladies’ Newsletter.” Leicester Chronicle. 15 November 1913, 2. “Fiction.” Athenaeum. 15 November 1913, 554, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 554. “Literary Notes.” Cambridge Independent Press. 21 November 1913, 5. “Novels.” Saturday Review. 22 November 1913, 658–9, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 210. “Recent Fiction.” Yorkshire Post. 26 November 1913, 5. “The Literary Corner.” Manchester Courier. 28 November 1913, 9. “Fiction – American Divorce.” Academy. 29 November 1913, 689.

184  The Customs of that Other Country “Books of the Day.” Leeds Mercury. 6 December 1913, 9. “Current Literature.” Aberdeen Journal. 5 January 1914, 3. “Our Bookshelf.” Belper News (Derbyshire). 9 January 1914, 9. “New Novels.” Illustrated London News. 21 February 1914, 34. Bookman. March 1914, 330, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 216. Henry James. “The Younger Generation.” Times Literary Supplement. 2 April 1914, 157–8, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 217–18.

Xingu and Other Stories British Edition Macmillan, 1916. British Reviews “New Novels.” Times Literary Supplement. 30 November 1916, 572, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 228–9. “Presentable Stories.” Birmingham Daily Gazette. 8 December 1916, 11. Gerald Gould. “New Novels.” New Statesman. 9 December 1916, 234, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 229–31. “Books of 1916.” Sheffield Independent. 20 December 1916, 5. “Fiction.” Spectator. 30 December 1916, 836–7, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 233–5. “List of New Books.” Athenaeum. December 1916, 598. “Novels and Short Stories.” Review of Reviews. December 1916, 679. “Review of Recent Books.” Western Mail. 13 January 1917, 2. “New Novels.” Illustrated London News. 17 February 1917, 22. Bookman. February 1917, 162–4. “Books to Read.” Bexhill-on-Sea Observer (East Sussex). 24 March 1917, 7.

Summer British Edition Macmillan, 1917. British Reviews Western Times (Devon). 17 September 1917, 3. “New Novels: Summer.” Times Literary Supplement. 27 September 1917, 464, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 260–1. “Novels Whose Scenes are Laid in New England.” Review of Reviews. September 1917, 33, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 261.

The Customs of that Other Country  185 “Life at the Full, Mrs. Edith Wharton’s New Novel.” Leeds Mercury. 1 October 1917, 3. “Literature.” Glasgow Herald. 4 October 1917, 3. Spectator. 13 October 1917, 389. “Literature.” Western Daily Press. 20 October 1917, 7. “Macmillan’s New Books.” Bury Free Press. 20 October 1917, 7. English Review. November 1917, 477. “Wharton (Edith Newbold), née Jones, Summer.” Athenaeum, ­November 1917, 597, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 263. “Fiction in Brief.” Saturday Review. 3 November 1917, 352–3. “New Books.” Liverpool Daily Post. 7 November 1917, 7. “Recent Fiction.” Yorkshire Post. 7 November 1917, 3. “New Novels.” Illustrated London News. 15 December 1917, 25. “Some Recent Books.” Nantwich Guardian (Cheshire). 4 January 1918, 3. “A New England Romance.” Bexhill-on-Sea Observer. 16 March 1918, 2. New Age. 20 June 1918, 127. [T.S. Eliot]. Egoist. January 1919, 10, reprinted in Contemporary ­Reviews, 263.

Notes 1 Shafquat Towheed has argued that Wharton regularly made corrections to the American editions before publishing some of her British editions, which makes the British editions of her books the most definitive. He credits this finding to George Ramsden, but the Wharton Macmillan correspondence provides further examples of her editing requests. Shafquat Towheed, Introduction to The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930, ed. Shafquat Towheed (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: ­Macmillan, 2007), 14. The forthcoming Oxford University Press Complete Works of Edith Wharton will examine these textual variations and will significantly add to scholarly understanding of Wharton’s transatlantic crossings. 2 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), 70–93; Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto and Windus, 2007), 232–60. 3 Towheed, Introduction, 2. 4 Towheed, Introduction, 27. 5 For fuller reference to what Wharton published where in what format, please consult Stephen Garrison, Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990). In Wharton scholarship and elsewhere, the first British printing is generally referred to as an “edition,” but Garrison’s bibliography distinguishes between a true “edition” in which the text has been reset on new plates and an “issue” in which a small alteration, often to the title page, affects the conditions of publication of some copies. Many of Wharton’s books in Britain were reissues of the American text purchased directly from the American publisher in small quantities. 6 Anna Girling claims that Scribner’s shipped only 500 copies to John Lane, suggesting that the publishers did not expect the short story collection to

186  The Customs of that Other Country sell very well. Anna Girling, “The Touch of a Vanished Hand: Edith Wharton’s Fraught Relationship with John Murray,” Times Literary Supplement, 26 June 2015, 13–15. However Garrison, Descriptive Bibliography lists two John Lane printings of the first edition in 1899 and one in 1906 (Garrison 19–20). Garrison located copies with deposit stamps of January 1900 but the books reached newspaper offices and were reviewed much earlier. 7 James W. Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray, ed. Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), x–xi, Helen Killoran, The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton (Rochester: Camden House, 2001). 8 “Fiction,” review of The Greater Inclination, Scotsman, 29 June 1899, 3. 9 “Fiction,” review of The Greater Inclination, Dundee Advertiser, 22 June 1899, 2. 10 “New and Recent Books,” review of The Greater Inclination, Western Morning News, 7 July 1899, 6. Further references cited in the text. 11 Review of The Greater Inclination, Saturday Review, 15 July 1899, 82. 12 Review of The Greater Inclination, Athenaeum, 5 August 1899, 189, reprinted in Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Tuttleton, Lauer, and Murray, 23. Throughout this chapter, I quote the Contemporary Reviews reprintings for the convenience of my readers. Further references are cited in the text. 13 Barbara Hochman, Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 1–3. 14 Hochman, Getting at the Author, 117. 15 The question of what moral thought or actions should entail and how that question is made more complicated by the extended and capitalist nature of late nineteenth-century society pervades realist and naturalist fictions. See Wai Chee Dimock, “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel,” in New Essays on “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” ed. Donald Pease (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 67–90; Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Jennifer L. Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The feminist moral questioning about whether respectable women can seek sexual pleasure and maintain their respectability is also discussed widely, in, for example, Elaine Showalter, Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 65–103; Ann Ardis’s discussion of New Woman novelists and their search for new ways of writing the sexual woman in New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 30–40. 16 The wrangling between Wharton, Lane, and Murray over who would publish her books and over the title of this book has been analyzed by Anna Girling, “‘Comedy of Errors’: The Correspondence between Edith Wharton and John Murray in the National Library of Scotland.” British reviewers knew that the book had been renamed by Wharton’s publisher and generally disliked the British name; given this point and for ease of reference for contemporary scholars, I refer to the book by its original title. 17 Review of A Gift from the Grave, Illustrated London News, 8 September 1900, 9. 18 Review of A Gift from the Grave, Manchester Courier, 8 August 1900.

The Customs of that Other Country  187 19 “Ethics of Love Literature,” review of A Gift from the Grave, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 10 August 1900, 2. 20 Review of A Gift from the Grave, Athenaeum, 18 August 1900, 210. 21 William Morton Payne, “Recent Fiction,” review of The Touchstone, The Dial, 1 September 1900, 126, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 37–38; “Ethics of Love Literature,” 2. 22 Review of A Gift from the Grave, St. James Gazette, 23 August 1900, 5. 23 Aline Gorren, “Studies in Souls,” review of The Touchstone, Critic, August 1900, 173–6. Reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 35. 24 Review of A Gift from the Grave, Scotsman, 6 August 1900, 2. 25 Edith Wharton, A Gift from the Grave (Edinburgh: John Murray, 1900), 183–4. 26 “Studies of Character,” review of Crucial Instances, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 3 July 1901, 3. 27 Review of The Valley of Decision, Academy, 17 May 1902, 505. 28 Review of The Valley of Decision, Saturday Review, 24 May 1902, 673; review of The Valley of Decision, Athenaeum, 14 June 1902, 748–9, British Periodicals, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 61. 29 “Literary Notices,” review of The Descent of Man and Other Stories, Sheffield Independent, June 15, 1904, 4. 30 Edith Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 11 June 1903, The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930, 65. All letters cited are from this volume, which will henceforth be abbreviated as CEWM in the notes. 31 Frederick Macmillan to Edith Wharton, June 23, 1903, CEWM, 69. 32 Edith Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 3 July 1903, CEWM, 69–70. 33 Edith Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 22 February 1904, CEWM, 73. 34 Edith Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 28 February 1904, CEWM, ­73–74; Edith Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 3 April 1904, CEWM, 75. 35 Frederick Macmillan to Edith Wharton, 5 April 1904, CEWM, 76. 36 Edith Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 7 April 1904, CEWM, 77. 37 Frederick Macmillan to Edith Wharton, 11 April 1904, CEWM, 78. 38 Edith Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 13 April 1904, CEWM, 79–80. 39 Frederick Macmillan to Edith Wharton, November 22, 1904, CEWM, 84. 40 Towheed, “Introduction,” 37. 41 Other critics have offered similar assessments of the reviews of The House of Mirth: Janet Beer, Pamela Knights, and Elizabeth Nolan, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (London: Routledge, 2007), 60–64; Killoran, The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton, 27–28; Shari Benstock, “A Critical History of The House of Mirth,” The House of Mirth, ed. Shari Benstock (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994), 309–25. 42 “The House of Mirth,” Spectator, 28 October 1905, 657, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 113. 43 “The House of Mirth,” Graphic, 25 November 1905, 28. 44 “Fiction: The House of Mirth,” Times Literary Supplement, 1 December 1905, 421, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 117. Further references are to the Contemporary Reviews edition and are cited in the text. 45 “Fiction,” review of The House of Mirth, Speaker, 16 December 1905, 286. 46 Joanne Wilkes, “Reviewing,” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Linda H. Peterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 247.

188  The Customs of that Other Country 47 Alice Meynell, “The House of Mirth,” Bookman, December 29, 1905, 130–1, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 124. Further references to the Contemporary Reviews edition are cited in the text. 48 “Novels,” review of Strangers and Wayfarers, by Sarah Orne Jewett, Saturday Review, 13 June 1891, 722–3. 49 “New Novels,” review of The House of Mirth, Manchester Courier, 7 ­November 1905, 3. 50 Review of “The House of Mirth,” Saturday Review, 17 February 1906, 209–10, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 130. 51 Benstock, “A Critical History,” 312. 52 “Fiction: The House of Mirth,” Times Literary Supplement, 1 December 1905, 421, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 117. 53 “The House of Mirth,” Saturday Review, 17 February 1906, 209–10, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 129–30. 54 “Fiction,” review of The House of Mirth, Speaker, 16 December 1905, 286. 55 See especially review of Stranger and Wayfarers, by Sarah Orne Jewett, Saturday Review 13 June 1891, 722–3, which was rare for discussing ­Jewett’s craft as well as her subject matter. 56 Review of “The House of Mirth,” Publishers’ Circular, 25 November 1905, 617. 57 “Fiction,” review of The House of Mirth, Speaker. 58 “News Notes,” Bookman, January 1906, 147–50. 59 Lydia G. Fish, “Claimed by Britain and America: Irving’s Bestselling Sketch Book,” Symbiosis 20, no. 2 (October 2016): 149. Fish uses these terms to describe the familiar, and familiarly exaggerated, depictions of the United States and Great Britain in the composition and print history of Washington Irving’s Sketchbook, one of many examples in which British and American authors produced “fun-house mirror images of each other— distorted and warped, but still recognizable” (148). 60 Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 2. 61 Letter from Edith Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 19 September 1908, CEWM, 108. 62 F.M. Colby, “The Book of the Month,” North American Review, February 1914, 294–9, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 212–13. I was unable to locate any such article by a Dr. Andrew McPnail. 63 “New Novels,” review of The Custom of the Country, Glasgow Herald, 13 November 1913, 10; “Fiction,” review of The Custom of the Country, Athenaeum, 15 November 1913, 554, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 209. José Martí wrote, “the arrogant mestiza who in persecution and in death is married to her ethnic identity,” “Ramona de Helen Hunt Jackson,” 1887, trans. Malena Florin, reprinted in Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, ed. Siobhan Senier (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2008) 432–4 (433). Then and now, British observers labeled arrogance a characteristically American sin. See, for example, Peter J. Smith, “Arrogance,” in “The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy” by Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 September 2009, www.timeshighereducation.com/features/theseven-deadly-sins-of-the-academy/408135.article. Ramona and Undine Spragg are indeed both “arrogant” in some similar ways, in the sense that they disobey orders to remain in one social caste and kinship group and follow their desires instead. They also persevere in following their desires beyond what the status quo considers comfortable or plausible. The pairing of the heroines reveals the negative and positive sides of arrogance.

The Customs of that Other Country  189 64 The Publishers’ Circular lists the Macmillan edition as appearing on 13 ­November 2013, but the British Museum date stamp is 9 December 1913. The date of the reviews suggests that the book was available before December. “New Novels,” review of The Custom of the Country, Glasgow Herald, 10. 65 “New Novels,” review of The Custom of the Country, Glasgow Herald, 10. 66 A “Constant Reader” of the weekly wrote a letter to the editor arguing that Moliere himself would have enjoyed Mrs. Wharton’s Custom of the Country and reported that “many of our daily papers” told of a nineteenyear-old lady in Kalamazoo County, Michigan who had divorced her third husband. This reader argued that anyone who knew Michigan well could not blame the lady overmuch. Letter to the Editor, Saturday Review, 27 December 1913, 812. 67 “Recent Fiction,” Yorkshire Post, 26 November 1913, 5. 68 “Our Bookshelf,” Belper News (Derbyshire), 9 January 1914, 9. 69 “Fiction – American Divorce,” review of The Custom of the Country, Academy, 29 November 1913, 689. 70 Amy L. Blair, Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 138–63. 71 Review of The Custom of the Country, Nation (New York), 15 May 1913, 494, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 201. 72 Similarly, the American critic James Huncker’s essay collection Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks (T. Werner Laurie, 1916) upheld Undine Spragg as not wicked, but merely a typical silly American woman (and, of course, this correction was circulated in the British press—see “Bits from Books,” Tamworth Herald, 5 February 1916). London weeklies saw her as a wicked monster. 73 As is often the case with reviewers, the reviewer was following the lead of the author. Wharton often compared the various sectors of American high society to groups then commonly studied by anthropologists, calling Ralph Marvell’s family the “Aborigines” of New York. “Fiction – A ­ merican ­Divorce,” review of The Custom of the Country, Academy, 209. 74 “The Literary Corner,” review of The Custom of the Country, Manchester Courier, 28 November 1913, 9. 75 Review of The Custom of the Country, Saturday Review, 22 November 1913, 658–9. 76 Lynn Bennett, “Presence and Professionalism: The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton,” Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture, ed. Gary Totten (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 21. 77 Review of The Custom of the Country, Saturday Review, 658. 78 Henry James, “The Younger Generation,” Times Literary Supplement, 2 April 1914, 157–8, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 217, 218. 79 Review of The Valley of Decision, Saturday Review, 24 May 1902, 673. 80 “Italian Gardens,” review of Italian Villas and Their Gardens, Speaker, 26 November 1904, 206–8. 81 There were, however, fewer reviews of her war volumes than of her US-­ centered fiction volumes of the same era. 82 Wharton critics complain that the author’s analyses of the full US social class system from poverty to the respectable working class and the middle class are often granted too little attention; see Dale M. Bauer, “Future Wharton Studies,” one part of “The Edith Wharton Review at 30: Wharton Studies Past, Present, and Future,” Edith Wharton Review, 30 no. 1 (2014): 77–81.

190  The Customs of that Other Country 83 Review of The Fruit of the Tree, Athenaeum, 14 December 1907, 762, Contemporary Reviews, 152. 84 Review of The Fruit of the Tree, Academy, 11 January 1908, 345. 85 Review of Ethan Frome, English Review, November 1911, 733. 86 Review of Ethan Frome, Manchester Courier, 17 November 1911, 10. 87 The copyright date of Macmillan’s first edition of Xingu and Other Stories illustrates the difficulties of preserving an accurate record of transatlantic publication. Macmillan’s first edition likely appeared in British bookshops in November or December 1916, based on the dating of the British reviews. Stephen Garrison, Descriptive Bibliography, 190 judges that this edition is actually a printing of the American first edition, published by Scribner’s on 21 October 1916. Although “1916” is listed in the facsimile of the Macmillan title page in Garrison and in the present-day online British library catalogue, Garrison records that the book was not deposited in the British Library until 1 February 1917. Deposit copies often did not reach the British Museum for weeks after the publication day because of the less rigid requirements of the British copyright law. Jacob Blanck, Preface to Bibliography of American Literature, Vol. One Henry Adams to Donn Byrne, compiled by Jacob Blanck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), xxxvi. 88 “New Novels,” review of Xingu and Other Stories, Times Literary Supplement, 30 November 1916, 572, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 228. 89 On the disruptions to the book trade, see Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G.C. King, introduction to Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, ed. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G.C. King (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–25. 90 “Novels, Letters, and Notes,” Aberdeen Journal, September 17, 1917, 5. 91 “Literature,” review of The Descent of Man and Other Stories, Western Daily Press (Bristol), 20 June 1904, 3. 92 The Fruit of the Tree was listed as received in late December 1907 but never reviewed; “This Week’s Books,” Saturday Review, 30 November 1907. 93 “List of New Books,” review of Xingu and Other Stories, Athenaeum, December 1916, 598. 94 “Novels,” review of The Descent of Man and Other Stories, Spectator, 18 June 1904, 965–6. 95 Edith Wharton, The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 331. 96 “Fiction,” review of Xingu and Other Stories, Spectator, 30 December 1916, 836–7, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 233. 97 Axel Nissen, Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 194–221. 98 Review of Xingu and Other Stories, Bexhill-on-Sea Observer (East Sussex), 24 March 1917, 7. 99 Review of Summer, Western Times (Devon), 27 September 1917, 3. 100 “New Novels: Summer,” Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 1917, 464, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 260–1; “Novels Whose Scenes are Laid in New England,” review of Summer, Review of Reviews, September 1917, 33. 101 “New Novels: Summer,” Times Literary Supplement, 260, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 260. Italics in the original. 102 “Wharton (Edith Newbold), née Jones, Summer,” Athenaeum, November 1917, 597, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 263. 103 Review of Summer, English Review, November 1917, 477.

The Customs of that Other Country  191 104 “New Novels,” review of Summer, Illustrated London News, 15 December 1917, 25. 105 “Some Recent Books,” review of Summer, Nantwich Guardian (Cheshire), 4 January 1918, 3. 106 Review of Summer, The New Age, 20 June 1918, 127. 107 [T.S. Eliot], review of Summer, Egoist, January 1919, 10, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 263. Further references cited in the text. 108 Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Priscilla Leder, “Visions of New England: The Anxiety of Jewett’s Influence on Ethan Frome,” Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, ed. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 167–81; Monika Elbert, “The Displacement of Desire: Consumerism and Fetishism in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Fiction,” Legacy 19 no. 2 (2002): 192–215. 109 F[rancis] H[ackett], “Loading the Dice,” review of Summer, New Republic, 14 July 1917, 311–12, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 249. Further references to the Contemporary Reviews edition are cited in the text. 110 Lawrence Gilman, “The Book of the Month: Mrs. Wharton Reverts to Shaw,” North American Review, August 1917, 304–7, reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 258. Further references to the Contemporary Reviews edition are cited in the text. 111 Review of Summer, Yorkshire Post, 7 November 1917, 3. 112 “Fiction in Brief,” review of Summer, Saturday Review, 3 November 1917, 352. 113 “Fiction in Brief,” review of Summer, Saturday Review, 352. 114 “Books and the Woman,” Gloucestershire Chronicle, 9 May 1914, 11.

Epilogue

It is now time to summarize the argument and consider the legacy of these British readings of American women today. The previous chapters have shown that the culture of reviewing subjected American women writers to elitism, sexism, and controlling moralism. Reviewers were liable to sniff at these writers’ use of colloquial American English or declare that a book is good despite its American origins. Since most of the books produced by the writers featured in this study were cheap editions affordable by the middle and sometimes even the working classes, reviewers occasionally adopted a condescending tone when reviewing them. Both Margaret Oliphant and Agnes MacDonnell, the novelist who reviewed Freeman, adopted an arch persona at the beginning of their reviews to assimilate better to the masculine style of reviewing. Both reviewers focused on what was different (fresh, vital, and unpolished) about American writing, in a critical move that today one might readily identify with American exceptionalism. It is interesting to see British women reviewers making a critical move that today is associated with overly proud Americans. As we have seen, the type of snide remarks expressed throughout this study conveys dislike of American colloquialism, emotionalism, and moralism, and they betray anxiety about American writers taking too prominent of a role in the British literary marketplace. For the most part, this is class-based anxiety about popular fiction engrossing the newly enlarged population of common readers, more than anxiety about women writers playing too large a role, or Americans invading. During the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, anxiety about Americans or women was not pervasive. For the most part, reviewers sounded surprised and delighted by American success. The discourse of Anglo-Saxonism attributed American success to its shared bloodlines with Britain, and I have shown that this discourse entered the British reviews in merely a minor note, even in the case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was herself an Anglo-Saxonist. Rarely was the critical response to American women’s writing a mouthpiece for Anglo-­ Saxonism. Transatlantic reading is characterized not only by power

Epilogue  193 struggles but also by reinterpretation. The critical response to American women’s writing was more frequently an opportunity for dissent. Sometimes, this took the form of principled dissent, such as that expressed by Francis Grierson when he argued that American women writers can save the literary world from chaos, or that expressed by Stephen Lucius Gwynn when he argued that the religiosity of Freeman’s Puritan characters might be treated as part of the modern mosaic of beliefs rather than a remnant from the seventeenth-century past, or that expressed by reviewers who respected Helen Hunt Jackson’s character Alessandro, or that expressed by news reports that admired Native American resistance during the run-up to the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. Although some of the sympathy for Native Americans comes across today as imperial nostalgia, in the context of the 1880s and 1890s, it was rather radical. More often, however, dissent took the form of a vaguer sense that American writing was fresh and different. Occasionally, one can see traces of feminist sensibility in the reviews. One can see this when reviewers preferred the unadulterated versions of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar. One can see this in Margaret Oliphant’s distinction between pious literature and spiritual exploration, or in her criticism of the conservative ending of Hedged In. One might read feminist support for women’s activism in readings of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Indian reform. One can certainly see feminist sensibility in sympathetic portrayals of Freeman’s home life or her spinster status. The word “feminist” actually appeared in a review of Women and Economics in 1899. Reviewers expressed sympathy for Edith Wharton’s female characters, although Charity Royall was considered too sordid for the Athenaeum or the English Review or the New Age, even though she received some support from the Saturday Review. With the exception of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, none of these women writers self-consciously joined or were self-consciously linked to the New Woman trend in literature that occurred soon after Freeman’s work was first received in Britain, and little of the analyses discussed in these pages might be considered openly feminist. Feminist literary criticism of the broader range of women’s literature seemed without a single home in these decades, although the women writers discussed in this book certainly benefitted from the literary analysis of their works they enjoyed in the literary weeklies as well as the fervent support from the woman’s press and feminist periodicals. Literary analysis and fervent support, though, were rarely combined in one venue. The lack of a perfect venue probably caused these writers consternation. But the lack need not bother the researcher. The impressionistic and granular nature of reviewing grants these reviews a freshness and utility that is lacking in some of the overgeneralizations about periods, national traditions, or the gender of authorship that occur in literary

194 Epilogue criticism. British reviewers found new things in American women’s texts, because they brought their local concerns to bear on the writing. The texts did not cease to exist in new readings of them; instead, they contained multiple strands ripe for multiple interpretations. Good reviews from the period assessed each novel or story or poetry collection on its own merit, drawing on internal cues as to what sort of text it is, not only on an author’s or publisher’s reputation. The impressionistic character of reviews is the reason it is difficult to draw conclusions about why particular writers found acclaim in Britain: reviews are too caught up in the specifics to launch generalizations about American or British character that hold true over time. The only firm conclusion to be drawn is that New York publishers obtained reviews for their writers’ works, while publishers from Chicago or elsewhere in the United States were not so successful. Even when reviewers encouraged Freeman to stick to lavender and lace, for example, they revealed something about her differing texts and about themselves that is illuminating for the researcher. The detail-oriented nature of reviews means that they took into account subtle differences between pieces of literature and articulated each text’s uniqueness. They debated the changing nature of literature, and women’s literature, and American literature afresh in a serial fashion, week after week or month after month. Literature and national literary traditions then were renewed and revised, not fixed into a canon. In their impressionistic, cautious, and empirical quality, reviews serve as a model for transatlantic reading that one might aspire to emulate today. Today’s legacy of these American women writers in Britain is far from assured, and I will turn to this subject now. After World War I, tastes changed. Fear of the Americanization of British arts and letters and ­British society became a program among some cultural elites. Genevieve Abravanel traces virulent reactions to American writers and literature in thinkers like F.R. and Queenie Leavis and T.S. Eliot, such as I have already addressed in Eliot’s dismissal of New England women’s writing.1 Abravanel focuses on US imperialism, jazz, and Hollywood, arguing that “[f]rom Hollywood films to jazz dance tunes, from the best-seller list to subscription book clubs, the United States seemed the source of or inspiration to much lowbrow culture in Britain.”2 But American literature straddled the border of high and popular culture and was hence not subjected to the same levels of disdain. Despite these fears of Americanization, the American women writers discussed in this book maintained their foothold in Britain in the early twentieth century. Edith Wharton outlasted the magazines that had served as the main gatekeepers into British critical prestige for American women writers during the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s. By the end of World War I, the Saturday Review, the Athenaeum, and the Spectator no longer printed the most probing or interesting reviews. The other authors featured in this book had lasting legacies as well. As explained

Epilogue  195 earlier, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel The Gates Ajar was reissued in 1917 in a shortened edition that ironed out the book’s maternal feeling and the transatlantic intellectual roots, thus omitting some of the more interesting contradictions and valences of Phelps’s nineteenth-century style of feminism. A play based on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s story, “A Conquest of Humility,” was performed in small communities in England in the 1920s. New British editions of Ramona appeared in 1911 and 1914, and British tourists were among the hordes that flocked to the Ramona attractions in Southern California during the early twentieth century. Although Zitkala-Ša turned to activism and journalism rather than book publishing in the early twentieth century, Old Indian Legends may have had a long shelf life in Britain. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s wise words about masculinity being more violent than femininity were quoted approvingly in the run-up to World War I, and her poems continued to appear in suffrage and provincial newspapers throughout the early twentieth century.3 Apart from this popular following, however, the critical reputation of these writers waned. The turn toward muscularity and a certain type of socialism that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s in US universities that rendered authors like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather noncanonical did eventually occur in Britain as well. This is illustrated when examining the library catalogues of Nottingham Public Library and the Nottingham Subscription Library, which is now called the Bromley House Library. In the Bromley House, the early twentieth-century Constable editions of Jewett’s works probably ordered in 1914 remain on the shelves, and Edith Wharton is also fairly well represented, with first editions of The Greater Inclination and The Buccaneers (1938). Several older editions of titles by Stowe, Whitman, Melville, and William Dean Howells are still in circulation (even though the Melville volumes were not purchased in the nineteenth century), but many of the other American writers whose books were stocked in the nineteenth century, particularly the women writers who had a popular following (like Susan Warner, Fanny Fern, Gertrude Atherton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, or Elizabeth Stuart Phelps), have long since disappeared.4 Many of these writers are no longer considered “classic” by a selective library like the Bromley House, and the Nottingham Public Library, whose holdings were always more diverse, has kept none of the actual volumes from its 1910 fiction list. As a result, the wider canon of American women’s writing has become less visible. Today’s university libraries in Britain generally hold only recent scholarly editions of these authors’ works (published since the 1980s), and even these editions are not necessarily held in such well-stocked university libraries as the University of Birmingham, the University of Manchester, the University of Leicester, or the University of Nottingham. Pre-1960 editions of a wide variety of American women writers

196 Epilogue are readily available at similarly large university libraries in the United States. Library holdings illustrate how selective is the current sense of what counts as a classic American book among university students. Male writers are well represented, and female writers are not. This book has sought to redress this problem by excavating the British acclaim received by these women writers in their day. While the bulk of American women writers are missing from British university study, today three turn-of-the-century American women writers are very well represented, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Women’s Press included The Awakening in its inaugural list of 1978, and according to Helen Taylor, who wrote the introduction to the volume, the “novel has opened doors to new British readers of southern literature in ways other southern works (notably those by William Faulkner) have failed to do.”5 When Herland (1915) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” were recovered in the 1960s, the Times and the Times Literary Supplement hailed their reappearance.6 British or UK-based scholars have written influential publications on these three writers, including but not limited to Janet Beer, Laura Rattray, Helen Taylor, Ann Heilmann, Jill Rudd, Val Gough, Robin Peel, Shafquat Towheed, and Hermione Lee. The Chopin, Wharton, and Gilman holdings at the aforementioned university libraries are strong, including first editions of Wharton’s works (both British and American), biographies, letter collections, diaries, and literary criticism. The strength of popular and scholarly interest in women’s writing means that the reputation of American women writers is not guaranteed to rise and fall alongside the reputation of American literature in Britain, but it is still worth noting that American literature is a staple ingredient at all levels of the British school and university curriculum. In 2014, the Education Secretary engendered outrage when he declared that he wanted to see more British literature being studied in the examination taken at the end of year 11 (the GCSE). The exam must now include a pre-twentieth-century novel written anywhere, Romantic poetry, a Shakespeare play, and some fiction or drama written in the British Isles since 1918. Headlines said that Michael Gove (who later promoted Brexit) had banned Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.7 Teachers complained that the big themes of American history, like slavery, racism, and the Depression, are familiar to students and resonate with them. Said one teacher, “it is much more difficult to explain the nuances of upper-­class romances. It’s lost on them. It’s boring.”8 Visiting for the Hay’s Festival, Toni Morrison declared that dividing literature by nationality was a mistake.9 The British Association for American Studies drew up a list of pre-twentieth-century American novels that would work in secondary school classrooms.10 The New Statesman responded

Epilogue  197 that the real danger to the government reforms of school curriculum is that English language will be emphasized at the expense of any sort of literary study, provincially English or otherwise. Four years on, teachers report the school literature curriculum to be narrowed. As a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature, I had mixed feelings about the uproar. Students should read pre-twentieth-century novels, and not all pre-twentieth-century novels focus on the nuances of upper-class romances. In fact, the marriage plot was one of the main novelistic ingredients that women writers actively avoided, and reviewers applauded them when they moved beyond it. In any case, this wrangling about the school curriculum illustrates that American literature has a firm place in Britain. Anxiety about it is a symptom of a wider search among Britons for what British identity might mean in the twenty-­fi rst century, and while anxiety about Americanization is constitutive of British identity, so is the fascination with the dominant English-­speaking country on the other side of the Atlantic. The growing influence of American literature in Britain is central to the story of British literature and British readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Late ­nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reviewers read American women’s writing astutely and found new things in their texts worth remembering; twenty-first-century Britons can as well, and their readings are an important part of the story of American literature.

Notes 1 Genevieve Abravanel, Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 2 Abravanel, Americanizing Britain, 18. 3 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Two Essays on the War,” Irish Citizen, (16 ­January 1915): 266. 4 The records preserved at the Bromley House Library do not indicate whether books were disposed because the copies were popular and therefore worn out or because they were no longer in demand. 5 Helen Taylor, “Bringing Kate Chopin to Britain: A Transatlantic Perspective,” in The Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival, ed. Bernard Koloski (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 59. 6 Peter Lewis, “Herland and Ourland,” Times Literary Supplement, 1 May 1981, 484; Caroline Moorehead, “Roaring and Fretful,” Times, 2 May 1981, 9. 7 Antonia Molloy, “Michael Gove ‘Axes’ American Classics Including to Kill a Mockingbird from English Literature GCSE syllabus,” Independent, 25 May 2014, www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/michael-­ gove-axes-to-kill-a-mockingbird-and-other-american-classics-from-englishliterature-gcse-9432818.html. 8 Philip Maughan, “Gove’s Provincial Syllabus Is Not the Issue: English Literature GCSE Is Slowly Being Phased Out,” New Statesman, 29 May 2014, www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/05/michael-goves-provincial-syllabus-­ not-issue-english-literature-gcse-slowly-being.

198 Epilogue 9 Anita Singh, “Michael Gove Will Regret the Decision to Divide Literature into ‘nationalistic categories’ on the GCSE Syllabus, says US Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison,” Telegraph, 28 May 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/hay-festival/10860569/Michael-Gove-is-wrong-to-divide-literature-by­nationality-says-Toni-Morrison.html. 10 See Susan Currell, Chair’s Report 2015, British Association for American Studies, www.baas.ac.uk/chairsreport2015/. The list is no longer on the BAAS website.

Selected Bibliography

Selected for reasons of space, I omit articles from the turn-of-the-century press included in the endnotes. I also omit references to the databases where many of these periodicals appear: British Periodicals 1680–1930, British Newspapers, 19th-Century U.K. Periodicals, British Newspaper Archive, or the Modernist Journals Project. For ease of reference for my readers, I have preferred to cite present-day editions of the literary texts discussed in the reviews, except when a review is commenting specifically on a detail from an early edition. In the notes, I omit the name of the author of the books being reviewed when that name is the featured author of that chapter. Allen, Judith A. “A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Epistles.” In Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-­Writing, edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Matthew Pethers, and ­Judith Newman, 465–81. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Anderson, Stuart. Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-­ American Relations, 1895–1904. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981. Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Athenaeum Index 1872–1900. University of Gent. https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/ RUG01/001/250/318/RUG01-001250318_2016_0001_AC.pdf Atherton, Gertrude. Adventures of a Novelist. London: Jonathan Cape, 1932. Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1978. Austin, Mary. “English Books and American Reviewers.” Bookman 61 (January 1922): 183–5. Baldwin, Dean. “The Tardy Evolution of the British Short Story.” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (1993): 23–33. Bannet, Eve Tavor. Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720– 1810: Migrant Fictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Barnes, John, Bill Bell, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Wallace Kirsop, and Michael Winship. “A Place in the World.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,

200  Selected Bibliography Vol. VI, 1830–1914, edited by David McKitterick, 595–634. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Barnstone, Aliki, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley, ed. The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997. Barrow, Logie. Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebians, 1850– 1910. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1986. Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural ­Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Barsham, Diana. Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meaning of Masculinity. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2000. Bauer, Dale M. “Future Wharton Studies.” One part of “The Edith Wharton Review at 30: Wharton Studies Past, Present, and Future.” Edith Wharton Review 30, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 77–81. Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” In Feminism and American Literary History, 3–18. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. ———. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Beard, George Miller. American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Putnam, 1881. Beaulieu, Micheline. City University. The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers 1830–1870. http://smcse.city.ac.uk/doc/cisr/web/athenaeum/reviews/ home.html. Beer, Janet and Bridget Bennett, ed. Special Relationships: Anglo-­A merican Affinities and Antagonisms 1854–1936. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Beer, Janet, Pamela Knights, and Elizabeth Nolan. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. London: Routledge, 2007. Bennett, Lyn. “Presence and Professionalism: The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton.” In Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture, edited by Gary Totten, 19–43. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Bennett, Mary Angela. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939. Bennett, Scott. “David Douglas and the British Publication of W.D. Howells’ Works.” Studies in Bibliography 25 (1972): 107–124. Bennett, Tony. “Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts.” In Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, edited by James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, 61–74. New York: Routledge, 2001. Benstock, Sheri. “A Critical History of The House of Mirth.” In The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, edited by Shari Benstock, 309–25. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994. Bergman, Jill. “‘A Silent Partner Long Enough’: Phelps Rewrites Gaskell’s North and South.” Studies in American Fiction 33, no. 2 (Autumn 2005): 147–64. Bernikow, Louise. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Bernstein, Susan David. “Transatlantic Sympathies and Nineteenth-­Century Women’s Writing.” In The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature, edited by Dale M. Bauer, 256–72. London: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Selected Bibliography  201 Best, Geoffrey. Mid-Victorian Britain 1851–75. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Bevington, Merle Mowbray. Saturday Review, 1855–1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England. New York: Morningside Heights, 1941. Bingham, Adrian. “Cultural Hierarchies and the Interwar British Press.” In Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960, edited by Erica Brown and Mary Grover, 55–67. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Blackett, Richard J. M. Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2000. Blair, Amy L. Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. Blanck, Jacob. Preface to Bibliography of American Literature, Vol. 1, xi–xli. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Blanck, Jacob and Michael Winship, ed. “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (Mary Adams).” In Bibliography of American Literature Vol. 8, 420–51. New ­Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Blanck, Jacob, ed. “Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.” In Bibliography of American Literature, Vol. 3, 224–43. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. Blunden, Margaret. The Countess of Warwick. London: Cassell, 1967. Bold, Christine. “Exclusion Acts: How Popular Westerns Brokered the Atlantic Diaspora.” In American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey, edited by Sylvia Söderlind and James Taylor Carson, 93–123. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. Boyd, Ann E. Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Bradbury, Malcolm. Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel. London: Secker and Warburg, 1995. Brake, Laurel. Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Brett, Rachel. British Library Reference Library. Email to author, 10 February 2015. Bromley House Library. Records. Bromley House, Nottingham. Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker. “General Introduction.” In Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume I: Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 1–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Brown, Lucy. Victorian News and Newspapers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Buell, Lawrence. “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon.” American Literary History 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 411–42. Bufkin, Sydney. “Gender, Genre, and Public Citizenship in the Reception of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Portion of Labor.” Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Conference. Denver, October 2012. Burt, Ryan. “‘Death Beneath This Semblance of Civilization’: Reading Zitkala-­ ­ Sa and the Imperial Imagination of the Romantic Revival.” Arizona Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 59–88.

202  Selected Bibliography Camfield, Gregg. “‘I Never Saw Anything at Once So Pathetic and Funny’: Humor in the Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman.” American Transcendental Quarterly 13, no. 3 (September 1999): 215–31. Campbell, Donna M. Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2016. ———. Introduction to The Fruit of the Tree, edited by Edith Wharton, Boston: Northeastern UP, 2000. Campbell, Duncan Andrew. English Public Opinion and the American Civil War. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003. Carpenter, Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio, ed. The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Carwardine, Richard. Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America 1790–1865. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. 1999; Harvard University Press, 2004. Chan, Winnie. The Economy of Short Stories in British Periodicals of the 1890s. New York: Routledge, 2007. Chew, Ada Nield. The Life and Writings of a Working Woman. Presented by Doris Nield Chew. London: Virago, 1982. City of Nottingham Central Lending Library. Catalogue of Novels, Tales, and Romances. Nottingham: Bromley House Library, 1910. Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Ithaca: Cornell, 2007. Cognard-Black, Jennifer. Narrative in the Professional Age: Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. New York: Routledge, 2004. Cohen, Michael C. “Reading the Nineteenth Century.” American Literary History 26, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 406–17. Colclough, Stephen and David Vincent. “Reading.” In Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. VI 1830–1914, edited by David McKitterick, 281–323. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Collier, Patrick. Modernism on Fleet Street. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006. Coope, Rosalys Coope and Pete Smith. Newstead Abbey a Nottinghamshire Country House: Its Owners and Architectural History 1540–1931. Bristol: Thoroton Society, 2014. Coultrap-McQuinn, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Davin, Anna. Foreword to The Life and Writings of Ada Nield Chew, ix–xxiii. London: Virago, 1982. Davis, Cynthia. “Abroad, Yet Narrow: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Transatlantic World.” Conference presentation at Transatlantic Women II, Nineteenth-­ Century American Women Writers Abroad, Florence, Italy, June 2013. Decker, William Merrill. “Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now.” In Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter Writing, edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Matthew Pethers, and Judith Newman, 171–84. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

Selected Bibliography  203 Delap, Lucy. The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Delap, Lucy and Maria DiCenzo. “Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-­ American Feminist Press and Emerging ‘Modernities.’” In Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, edited by Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier, 48–65. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. DeLyser, Dydia. Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Demoor, Marysa. “Editors and the Nineteenth-Century Press.” In The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, edited by Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 89–101. London: Routledge, 2016. ———. Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katharine Mansfield, 1870–1920. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000. DeSpain, Jessica. Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. Dimock, Wai-Chee. “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel.” In New Essays on “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” edited by Donald Pease, 67–90. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. “A Theory of Resonance.” PMLA 112, no. 5 (October 1997): 1060–1071. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Douglas, David. Scrapbook. National Library of Scotland. Manuscript. Acc. 12309. Edwards, Edward. Free Town Libraries, Their Formation, Management, and History, in Britain, France, Germany, and America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1869) 2010. Elbert, Monika. “The Displacement of Desire: Consumerism and Fetishism in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Fiction.” Legacy 19, no. 2 (2002): 192–215. Eliot, Simon. “Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Age and After.” In The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Vol. 3 1850–2000, edited by Alistair Black and Peter Hoare, 125–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. The English Catalogue of Books, Comprising the Contents of the ‘London’ and the ‘British’ Catalogues, and the Principal Works Published in the United States of America and Continental Europe. Vol. II Jan. 1863 to Jan 1872. London: Sampson Low, 1873. The English Catalogue of Books, Comprising the Contents of the ‘London’ and the ‘British’ Catalogues, and the Principal Works Published in the United States of America and Continental Europe. Vol 5 Jan. 1890 to Dec. 1897. London: Sampson Low, 1897. Estes, Sharon. “‘In Its English Dress’: Reading Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World as a Transatlantic Religious Bestseller.” In Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, edited by Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, 208–31. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012.

204  Selected Bibliography Fagg, John, Matthew Petthers, and Robin Vandome. “Introduction: Networks and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical.” American Periodicals, 23, no. 2 (2013): 93–104. Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Fetterley, Judith and Marjorie Pryse. Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Fish, Lydia G. “Claimed by Britain and America: Irving’s Bestselling Sketch Book.” Symbiosis 20, no. 2 (October 2016): 147–69. Fleissner, Jennifer. Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Flint, Kate. The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. ———. The Woman Reader 1837–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Forster, Geoffrey and Alan Bell. “The Subscription Libraries and Their Members.” In Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. III, 1850–2000, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare, 147–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Frank, Lucy. “‘Bought with a Price’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Commodification of Heaven in Postbellum America.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 55, no. 2 (2nd Quarter, 2009): 165–92. Frankel, Robert. Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890–1950. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Fraser, Hilary, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston, ed. Gender and the Victorian Periodical Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [Freeman], Mary E. Wilkins. A Humble Romance and Other Stories. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890. Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Edited by Brent Kendrick. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1985. ———. A Mary Wilkins Freeman Reader. Edited by Mary R. Reichardt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins File. American Academy of Arts and Letters. New York City. Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols. Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894. Garrison, Stephen. Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. “Less Work for ‘Mother’: Rural Readers, Farm Papers, and the Makeover of ‘The Revolt of “Mother.”’” Legacy 26, no. 1 (2009): 119–49. ———. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gaul, Theresa Strouth and Sharon M. Harris. Introduction to Letters and Cultural Transformations in the U.S., 1760–1860, edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris, 1–16. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Giles, Paul. Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Selected Bibliography  205 ———. ‘Introduction: The New Atlantic Studies.’ In Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, edited by Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott, 1–14. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. ———. Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Concerning Children. London: Putnam’s, 1903. https://archive.org/details/concerningchildr00gilmuoft. ———. In This Our World & Uncollected Poems. Edited by Gary Scharnhorst and Denise D. Knight. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012. ———. A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900. Edited by Mary A. Hill. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1995. ———. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. ———. Papers. Collection 177. Folder 150. Schlesinger Library. Harvard University. Gillman, Susan. “Otra vez Caliban/Encore Caliban: Adaptation, Translation, Americas Studies.” American Literary History 20 no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2008): 187–209. ———. “Ramona in ‘Our America.’” In José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, edited by Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández, 91–111. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Girling, Anna. “‘Comedy of Errors’: The Correspondence between Edith Wharton and John Murray in the National Library of Scotland.” Edith Wharton Review 32, no. 1–2 (2016): 61–80. ———. “The Touch of a Vanished Hand: Edith Wharton’s Fraught Relationship with John Murray.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5856 (26 June 2015): 13–15. Glasser, Leah Blatt. In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Gohdes, Clarence. American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1944. Golden, Catherine J. “‘Written to Drive Nails With’: Recalling the Early Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, 242–66. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Goodale, Elaine. “Ramona.” The Southern Workman (February 1885). In Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, edited by Siobhan Senier, 428–9. Peterborough: Broadview Editions, 2008. Grierson, Francis. The Valley of Shadows: Sangamon Sketches. Edited by Robert Bray. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Griffith, George V. “An Epistolary Friendship: The Letters of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to George Eliot.” Legacy 18, no. 1 (April 2001): 94–100. Grimwood, Michael. “Architecture and Autobiography in ‘The Revolt of “Mother.”’” American Literary Realism 40, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 66–82. Gutman, Huck, ed. As Others Read Us: International Perspectives on American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

206  Selected Bibliography Gutman, Huck. Introduction to As Others Read Us: International Perspectives on American Literature, edited by Huck Gutman, 3–16. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Hafen, P. Jane. Introduction to Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera, edited by Zitkala-Ša, xiii–xxiv. Lincoln: University of ­Nebraska Press, 2001. Hammond, Mary. “Readers and Readerships.” In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914, edited by Joanne Shattock, 30–49. Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 2010. Hanrahan, Heidi M. “‘Worthy the Imitation of the Whites’: Sarah Winnemucca and Mary Peabody Mann’s Collaboration.” MELUS 38, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 119–36. Harper & Brothers Records. Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Columbia University in the City of New York. Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Henderson, Desirée. Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790–1870. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. Hoare, Peter. “The Operatives’ Libraries of Nottingham: A Radical Community’s Own Initiative.” Library History 19 (November 2003): 173–84. Hochman, Barbara. Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Holbo, Christine. “‘Industrial & Picturesque Narrative’: Helen Hunt Jackson’s California Travel Writing for the Century.” American Literary Realism 42, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 243–66. Homestead, Melissa. American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822– 1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. www.trc.ca/ websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_ the_Future_July_23_2015.pdf. Houghton, Walter E., ed. Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 5 Vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–1989. Houghton Mifflin Archives. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Howard, June. Publishing the Family. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Howells, William Dean. “The Editor’s Study.” Harper’s Monthly. September 1887, 639–40. Reprinted in Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, 19–20. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” In The Book History Reader, edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, 391–6. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006. Irwin, Robert McKee. “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona: A Transnational Reading of the Old West.” In Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West, edited by Reginald Dyck and Cheli Reutter, 153–78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Jackson, Helen Hunt, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.

Selected Bibliography  207 ———. A Century of Dishonour: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. London: Chatto and Windus, 1881. ———. The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885. Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. ———. Ramona. Edited by Shirley B. Jevons. London: Sampson Low, 1914. ———. Ramona. Edited by Siobhan Senier. Peterborough: Broadview Editions, 2008. Jacobus, Mary, ed. Women Writing and Writing about Women. London: Croom Helm, 1979. Jauss, Hans Robert. “The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding.” In Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, edited by James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, 7–28. London: Routledge, 2001. Johanningsmeier, Charles. “The Current State of Freeman Bibliographical and Textual Studies.” ATQ 13 (1999): 173–96. Juhasz, Suzanne, ed. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Kaplan, Amy. “Nation, Region, and Empire.” In The Columbia History of the American Novel, edited by Emory Elliott, 240–66. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Kessler, Carol. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Boston: Twayne, 1982. ———. “The Heavenly Utopia of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.” In Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, edited by Marleen Barr and Nicholas D. Smith, 85–95. New York: University Press of America, 1983. Kilcup, Karen L., ed. Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Killoran, Helen. The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton. Rochester: Cambden House, 2001. Knight, Denise D. “‘But O My Heart’: The Private Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, 267–84. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Knight, Denise D. and Jennifer S. Tuttle. Introduction to The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle, xv–xxii. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. Kohn, Denise, Sarah Meer, and Emily B. Todd. “Introduction: Reading Stowe as a Transatlantic Writer.” In Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture, edited by Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer, and Emily B. Todd, xi–xxxi. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Koppelman, Susan. “Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.” In Two Friends, and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers, 124–8. New York: Meridian, 1994. Kramer, Paul A. “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and the United States Empires, 1880–1910.” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002): 1315–53. Ladino, Jennifer K. Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Lane, Ann J. Introduction to Herland, v–xxiii. London: Women’s Press, 1979. Lanser, Susan S. “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1989): 415–441.

208  Selected Bibliography Lauter, Paul. “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties.” In Canons and Contexts, 22–47. Cary: Oxford University Press, 1991. Leder, Priscilla. “Visions of New England: The Anxiety of Jewett’s Influence on Ethan Frome.” In Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, edited by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards, 167–81. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, ed. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst. “Reading the ‘Fin De Siècle.’” In The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900, edited by Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, xiii–xxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Chatto and Windus, 2007. Lewandowski, Tadeusz. Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-­ ­Š a. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Lomas, Laura. Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Long, Lisa A. “‘The Corporeity of Heaven’: Rehabilitating the Civil War Body in The Gates Ajar.” American Literature 69, no. 4 (December 1997): 781–811. Lueck, Beth L., Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, ed. Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012. Lueck, Beth L., Sirpa Salenius, and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, ed. Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2017. Luis-Brown, David. Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Machen, Arthur. Hieroglyphics. London: Grant Richards, 1902. Macmillan Archives. Microfilm. Chadwyk-Healey Ltd. Malcolm, David. The British and Irish Short Story Handbook. New York: ­Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Manning, Susan. The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Marchalonis, Shirley. Introduction to Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, 1–15. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. Mardment, Brian, ed. The Archives of George Routledge and Co., 1853–1902. London: Chadwyck-Healey, 1973. Microfilm. Mathes, Valerie Sherer. Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Martí, José. “Ramona de Helen Hunt Jackson.” Translated by Malena Florin. In Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, edited by Siobhan Senier, 432–34. 1887; Toronto: Broadview Press, 2008. Matheson, Ann. “Scottish Periodicals.” In Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, Vol. 2, edited by J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, 98–109. New York: MLA, 1989.

Selected Bibliography  209 McCoppin, Rachel. “Sympathy for the Other: British Attempts at Understanding the American Indian.” Symbiosis 14, no. 2 (October 2010): 237–55. McFadden, Margaret H. Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. McGettigan, Katie. “‘Across the Waters of This Disputed Ocean’: The Material Production of American Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” In Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Smith and Anna Barton, 129–48. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ———. “Literary History, Book History, and Media Studies.” In Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion, edited by Hester Blum, 23–49. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Meer, Sarah. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 4 (December 2013): 540–69. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Moylan, Michele. “Materiality as Performance: The Forming of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona.” In Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America, edited by Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles, 223–47. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Murphy, Jacqueline Shea. “Replacing Regionalism: Abenaki Tales and ‘Jewett’s’ Coastal Maine.’ American Literary History 10, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 664–90. Murray, Hannah Rose. “‘To Hear the Black People’s Side of the Story’: Ida B. Wells and her Transatlantic Visit to Britain.” Paper presented at the British Association of American Studies Conference, CanterburyApril 2017. Myers, Jeffrey. Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Narbona Carrión, María Dolores. “Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers’ European Connections: The Case of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.” In New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies, edited by Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson and Will Kaufman, 117–29. Lanham: University Press of America, 2002. Newlin, Keith. “Unwitting Provocateur: Mary Wilkins Freeman and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.” Resources for American Literary Study 32 (2009): 141–161. Nicholson, Bob. “Transatlantic Connections.” In The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, edited by Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 162–74. London: Taylor and Francis, 2016. Nisbett, Richard E. and Timothy DeCamp Wilson. “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (March 1977): 231–59. Nissen, Axel. Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000. Nottingham Free Library. Index-Catalogue. 1868.

210  Selected Bibliography Nottingham Free Public Lending Library. Catalogue. 1881. O’Brien, Sharon. “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather.” American Quarterly 40, no. 1 (March 1988): 110–26. O’Neill, Bonnie Carr. “‘Does Such a Being Exist?’: Olive Branch Readers Respond to Fanny Fern.” In Letters and Cultural Transformations in the U.S., 1760–1860, edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris, 161–77. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Owram, Douglas. “White Savagery: Some Canadian Reaction to American ­I ndian Policy, 1867–1885.” Kingston: Queen’s University, 1971. MA Thesis in History. Padget, Martin. “Travel Writing, Sentimental Romance, and Indian Rights Advocacy: The Politics of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona.” Journal of the Southwest 42, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 833–76. Palmer, Beth. “Prose.” In The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, edited by Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 138–51. London: Routledge, 2016. Parry, J.P. “Nonconformity, Clericalism and ‘Englishness’: the United Kingdom.” In Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 152–80. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Peterson, Linda H. “Writing for Periodicals.” In The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, edited by Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 77–88. London: Taylor and Francis, 2016. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. Chapters from a Life. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896. ———. The Gates Ajar. Edited by Helen Sootin Smith. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964. ———. The Gates Ajar in Three Spiritualist Novels. Edited by Nina Baym. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ———. The Silent Partner: A Novel and The Tenth of January: A Short Story. New York: Feminist Press, 1983. Phillips, Kate. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pigeon, Stephan. ‘“I too Resolve to Unravel These!”’ Journal of Victorian Culture Online. http://blogs.tandf.co.uk/jvc/2017/03/27/stephan-pigeon-i-too-resolveto-unravel-these/. ———. “Steal it, Change it, Print it: Transatlantic Scissors-and-Paste Journalism in the Ladies’ Treasury, 1857–1895.” Journal of Victorian Culture 22, no. 1 (March 2017): 24–39. Porter, Bernard. Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008. Pratt, Annis. “The New Feminist Criticism.” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 872–8. Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Radway, Janice A. “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor.” Book Research Quarterly 2 (Fall 1986): 7–29.

Selected Bibliography  211 Richmond, Stephanie J. “Abolitionists Abroad: Women, Travel, and Abolitionist Networks.” GHI Bulletin Bulletin Supplements 13 (2017): 111–29. www. ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/GHI_Washington/Publications/Supplements/ Supplement_13/111.pdf. Reynolds, David S. Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Rezek, Joseph. London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. ———. “What We Need from Transatlantic Studies.” American Literary History 26, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 791–803. Rhea, John M. A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941. University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Rich, Charlotte. Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era. St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 2009. Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Rifkin, Mark. “The Transatlantic Indian Problem.” American Literary History 24, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 337–55. Robinson, Lillian S. “Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective.” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 879–89. Rogers, Henry Munroe Collection. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Royle, Edward. Modern Britain: A Social History 1750–1997. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. St. Germain, Jill. Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada 1867–1877. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-­ Victorian England. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Senier, Siobhan. Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. Shattock, Joanne. “The Culture of Criticism.” In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914, edited by Joanne Shattock, 71–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Showalter, Elaine. “English Fruits and Yankee Turnips: A Literary Banquet.” Plenary given at Transatlantic Women Conference: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe, University of Oxford, 16–19 July 2008. ———. A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Vintage, 2009. ———. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. ———. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” In Women Writing and Writing about Women, edited by Mary Jacobus, 22–41. London: Croom Helm, 1979. ———. “Women and the Literary Curriculum.” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 872–8.

212  Selected Bibliography Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 168–85. London: Virago Press, 1986. Smith, Gail K. “From the Seminary to the Parlor: The Popularization of Hermeneutics in The Gates Ajar.” Arizona Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 99–133. Smith, Jeanne. “‘A Second Tongue’: The Trickster’s Voice in the Works of ­Zitkala-­Sa.” In Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective, edited by Elizabeth Ammons and Annette WhiteParks, 46–60. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994. Smith, Peter J. “Arrogance.” In “The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy” by Matthew Reisz. Times Higher Education Supplement. 17 Sept. 2009. www. timeshighereducation.com/features/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-the-academy/ 408135. Smith, Whitney Womack. “Stowe, Gaskell, and the Woman Reformer.” In Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture, edited by ­Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer, and Emily B. Todd, 89–110. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Sofer, Naomi Z. Making the “America of Art”: Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-­C entury Women Writers. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women’s Writing. New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1975. Springer, Marlene. “The Death of Edna Pontellier and the Card Catalog.” Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival, edited by Bernard K ­ oloski, 131–40. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Stevens, Laura M. “Transatlanticism Now.” American Literary History 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 93–102. Stevenson, Anne. “Writing as a Woman.” In Women Writing and Writing about Women, edited by Mary Jacobus, 159–76. London: Croom Helm, 1979. Stoneman, Patsy and Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce, with Angela Leighton. European Intertexts: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. Stowe, William. “Transatlantic Subjects.” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 159–70. Strong, Rowen. Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernising Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Sutherland, John. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. Harlow, ­E ssex: Longman, 1988. Tamarkin, Elisa. Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Taylor, Michael P. “Not Primitive Enough to Be Considered Modern: Ethnographers, Editors, and the Indigenous Poets of the American Indian Magazine.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 28, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 45–72. Thomas, Brook. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Selected Bibliography  213 Thomas, Heather Kirk. “‘It’s Your Father’s Way’: The Father-Daughter Narrative and Female Development in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke.” Studies in the Novel 29 (1997): 26–39. Todd, William B. and Ann Bowden. Tauchnitz International Editions in English 1841–1955: A Bibliographical History. New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1988. Tompkins, Jane. “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne’s Literary Reputation.” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, edited by James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, 133–54. New York: Routledge, 2001. Toth, Susan Allen. “Defiant Light: A Positive View of Mary Wilkins Freeman.” In Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, 123–31. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. Totten, Gary. “Zitkala-Śa and the Problem of Regionalism: Nations, Narratives and Critical Traditions.’ American Indian Quarterly 29, no. 1–2 (Spring 2005): 84–123. Towheed, Shafquat. Introduction to The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930, edited by Edith Wharton, 1–58. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007. ———. “Negotiating the List: Launching Macmillan’s Colonial Library and Author Contracts.” In The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume 2: Nationalisms and the National Canon, edited by John Spiers, 134–51. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Towheed, Shafquat and Edmund G.C. King. Introduction to Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, edited by Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G.C. King, 1–25. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Tracey, Karen. Plots and Proposals: American Women’s Fiction, 1850 –90. ­Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Tuchman, Gaye with Nina E. Fortin. Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Turkes, Doris J. “Must Age Equal Failure?: Sociology Looks at Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Old Women.’ ATQ 13, no. 3 (September 1999): 197–215. Tuttleton, James W., Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray, ed. Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Victoria Research Web. http://victorianresearch.org/. Wagner, Bryan. “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Errant Local Color.” Arizona Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 1–23. Wagner-McCoy, Sarah. “Taming the American Shrew: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s New Woman and the Transatlantic Courtship Plot.” In Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, edited by Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott, 266–81. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Walker, Nancy A. “Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts.” In The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, edited by Nancy A. Walker, 3–21. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

214  Selected Bibliography Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. London: Verso, 1992. Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900. CD. Waterman, Rory. “The Art of Non-criticism, or, The Sword is Mightier Than the Pen.” PN Review 41, no. 5 (2015): 10–12. Warner, Sylvia Townsend. “Item, One Empty House.” In Collected Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, 118–22. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. Watson, William Lynn. “‘The Facts Which Go to Form This Fiction’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelp’s The Silent Partner and the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics Report.” College Literature 29, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 6–25. Weisbuch, Robert. Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Westbrook, Perry D. Mary Wilkins Freeman. Revised ed. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. Wexler, Laura. “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, 9–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance: An Autobiography. London: J.M. Dent, 1993. ———. The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007. ———. A Gift from the Grave. Edinburgh: John Murray, 1900. ———. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Edited by R.W.B Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Scribner’s, 1988. Wilkes, Joanne. “Reviewing.” In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by Linda H. Peterson, 236–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ———. Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. London: Routledge, 2010. Wilkinson, Elizabeth. “Gertrude Bonnin’s Rhetorical Strategies of Silence.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 33–56. Wilson, Timothy D. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002. Woolford, John. “Periodicals and the Practice of Literary Criticism, 1855–64.” In The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, edited by ­Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff, 109–42. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982. Youngkin, Molly. Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Zagarell, Sandra. “Country’s Portrayal of Community and the Exclusion of Difference.” In New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, edited by June Howard, 39–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Zitkala-Ša. “America’s Indian Problem.” In American Indian Stories, 185–95. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. ———. Old Indian Legends. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Index

Academy 13–14, 77, 176 Alcott, Louisa May 15, 33, 40, 54 American exceptionalism 6–8, 192 Ammons, Elizabeth 6 Anglo-Saxon Review 30, 80 Anglo-Saxonism 10, 20, 72–3, 76–81, 91–3, 135–6, 141–4, 146–7, 192 anti-imperialism 106–34 Ashwell, Frances E. 92–3 Atalanta 20, 86 Atherton, Gertrude 15, 16, 35, 41, 195 Athenaeum 13–14, 20, 176, 194 Austen, Jane 36, 180 Austin, Mary Hunter 15, 18, 27n71, 36, 41 Berry, Walter 160 Besant, Walter 81 Bourget, Paul 160 Briggs, William H. 38 Brontë, Emily 75, 180 Brooke, Emma Frances 8, 91 Booth, Mary 90 Bryce, James 10 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 16, 36, 77 Byron, Lord George Gordon 1 Cable, George Washington 92 Callahan, S. Alice 8, 15, 109 Canfield, Cass 38 Chase Act 2, 37 Chew, Ada Nield 147–9 Chopin, Kate 15, 18, 41, 196 Clegg, Susan 147, 149 Colby, F.M. 170, 172 Collyer, Robert 35 Contemporary Review 14 Cooper, Anna Julia 15, 27n69

Cooper, James Fenimore 40–2 copyright 2, 28, 33, 37, 43n2, 190n87 Crane, Stephen 34, 84 Dickinson, Emily 1 Dixon, Ella Hepworth 9, 180 Douglas, David 29–30, 74, 76, 78, 82, 87–90, 94, 177 Douglass, Frederick 40 Doyle, Arthur Conan 72, 82 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice 15, 17 Edgeworth, Maria 87 Edinburgh Review 14 Eliot, George 36, 64, 167, 180 Eliot, T.S. 140, 178, 194 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 31 Evans, Augusta 15, 18 feminist literary criticism 6–9, 86 Fern, Fanny 18, 40, 87, 195 Fields, Osgood, and Company 49 Fletcher, Constance 36 Frederic, Harold 84 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins 8–10, 14, 16, 19–20, 29–30, 35–42, 72–105, 125, 169, 177, 193, 195; “A Conquest of Humility” 38; “A Far-Away Melody” 76, 84–5; A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories 41; “The Happy Day” 80; “A Humble Romance” 75–6, 87, 89–90; A Humble Romance and Other Stories 29, 74–90; Pembroke 9, 74, 83–4, 86; The Portion of Labour 93; “The Revolt of ‘Mother” 87 Freewoman 30, 178 Fuller, Margaret 40

216 Index Garland, Hamlin 16, 31, 39, 75 Gaskell, Elizabeth 34, 64 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 8–9, 14–16, 20, 36, 38, 54, 135–52, 192–3, 195–6; Concerning Children 138, 142–4, 150; In This Our World 136, 138–40, 150; The Man-Made World 136, 150–1; Women and Economics 140–1, 145–6; “The Yellow Wallpaper” 148, 196 Glasgow Herald 14 Goodale, Elaine 115 Grand, Sarah 91–3 Green, A. Romney 148 Grierson, Frances 36–7 Guardian 14 Gwynn, Stephen Lucius 4, 17 Hackett, Francis 179 Hardy, Thomas 92, 93 Harper & Brothers 19, 20, 38, 76, 78, 93 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins 15, 27n69 Harte, Bret 33, 40, 41 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1, 40–2 Hopkins, Pauline 8, 15, 17 Howells, William Dean 31, 78, 93, 195 Impey, Catherine 107, 121 Iota (Kathleen Mannington Caffyn) 91–3 Ireland 16, 72–3, 75–6, 80–5 Irving, Washington 40 Iser, Wolfgang 13 Jackson, Helen Hunt 12, 15–6, 20, 40, 106–21, 127–8, 193, 195; A Century of Dishonour 20, 37–8, 110–14; Ramona 20, 36, 109, 114–21 Jacobs, Harriet 40 James, Henry 40, 160–1, 174 Jauss, Hans Robert 13 Jewett, Sarah Orne 10, 15, 34, 40–2, 75, 77, 90, 168–9 King, Grace 15, 18 Ladies’ Treasury 17 Lane, John 29

Lazarus, Emma 15, 35 Leavis, Queenie 140, 194 libraries 19, 28, 39–42, 180, 195–6 literacy, rise of and education 28–9, 54–55 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 41 Lubbock, Percy 160, 179 MacDonald, J. Ramsay 38, 107 MacDonnell, Agnes 35, 78–80, 86, 192 Machen, Arthur 82 Macmillan, Frederick 12, 160, 165–7 Macmillan Publishers 12, 114–5, 160 Marsden, Dora 30 Martí, José 171 Melville, Herman 40–2, 195 Meredith, George 92 Meynell, Alice 160, 168–9 Miller, Joaquin 33 Murray IV, John 30 naturalism 2, 34, 92–3, 162, 175 networks 23n14, 28, 31, 35 New Woman and New Woman writing 2, 8, 21n3, 91–93, 180 Nicoll, W. Robertson 35 nonconformism 5, 72, 81–5 O’Dell, Edith 39 Oliphant, Margaret 33–4, 54, 59–64, 192–3 Pall Mall Gazette 14, 36, 73 Parr, Louisa 75 Paul, C. Kegan. 35, 59–60 periodical databases 15–16, 17 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart 1, 5, 15–6, 18–9, 29, 36–7, 40–1, 48–67, 87, 195; Beyond the Gates 50; Doctor Zay 64; The Gates Ajar 1, 12, 29–30, 37, 48–61, 85, 195; Hedged In 19, 33, 61–2; The Silent Partner 12, 29, 33–5, 62–4, 93; The Story of Avis 40, 64 Piatt, Sarah 15, 16 pietistic writing 5, 10, 36, 49–61 realism 160–4, 169–70 reform writing 3, 20, 61–4, 106–34, 193 regional writing 33–4, 38–9, 72–105, 108, 115, 177

Index  217 Review of Reviews 30 reviewing 3, 4–5, 11–12, 14, 19, 31–6, 140, 160, 192–4 Richardson, Dorothy M. 146–7 Robinson, Edwin Arlington 9 Routledge 48, 50 Sampson Low 29, 30, 49–54, 114–5 Saturday Review 13–14, 20, 26n58, 176, 194 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria 7, 40 Schreiner, Olive 8 Scotland 58, 60–1, 72, 75–6, 82–5, 136–7, 171 Scott, C.P. 14 Scribner’s Magazine and Scribner 30, 165 Shafts 14, 20, 86, 140 Sharp, William 4, 35–6 Shaw, George Bernard 9, 38 short story, the 75, 161–2 Smith’s, W.H. 29 Southworth, E.D.E.N. 7 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 6, 8 Speaker 13–14 Spectator 14, 18, 82–3, 176, 194 Stead, W.T. 30, 36, 73 Stevenson, Robert Louis 92 Stoddard, Elizabeth 36 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 2, 21n2, 34, 36, 40–2, 110, 195 Sui Sin Far 8 Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, Millicent (Duchess of Sutherland) 38 Thoreau, Henry David 40 transatlanticism 9–12, 16, 73 transatlantic reading 3, 13, 192–4 Twain, Mark 1

US Civil War 2, 37, 60 Ward, Lock, and Tyler 1, 17, 50, 59, 78, 87–90 Ware, Vron 17 Warner, Susan 1, 7, 18, 40–2, 87, 195 Warner, Sylvia Townsend 76, 94 Warwick, Frances Evelyn Greville (Daisy) 36 Wedgwood, Julia 115, 120 Wells (-Barnett), Ida B. 15, 17, 111 Whittier, John Greenleaf 1, 40 Wharton, Edith 5, 8–9, 12–3, 15–6, 20, 28, 35, 38, 41–2, 159–85, 193, 196; “Bunner Sisters” 175; The Custom of the Country 20, 170–4; The Descent of Man and Other Stories 165, 176; Ethan Frome 29, 175; The Fruit of the Tree 175–6; The Greater Inclination 29–30, 161; The House of Mirth 20, 34, 166–9; Summer 20, 175, 177–80; The Touchstone (A Gift from the Grave) 30, 163–4, 168; The Valley of Decision 164, 174; Xingu and Other Stories 175–7 Whitman, Walt 8, 40–1, 195 Wiggin, Kate Douglas 10, 77 Willard, Frances 90 Winnemucca, Sarah 15, 109 Woman’s Herald 14, 20, 86, 103n85 Woolson, Constance Fenimore 15, 34 World War I 5, 175–80, 194–5 Zangwill, Israel 92 Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin) 15, 16, 38, 107–8, 110, 121–9, 195; Old Indian Legends 108, 121–8, 195 Zola, Émile 37