Kate Chopin's compelling, candid portrait of a woman attempting to seek a life beyond her role as devoted wife and mother was considered dangerous when first published in 1899 The Pontellier family are spending a hot, lazy holiday on the Gulf of Mexico. No-one expects that Edna Pontellier should be preoccupied with anything more than her husband and children. When an illicit summer romance awakens new ideas and longings in Edna, she can barely understand herself, and cannot hope for aid or acceptance in the stifling attitudes of Louisiana society. Now considered a classic, this tale of liberation caused a scandal when it was first published and was dismissed as "vulgar," "unhealthy," and "morbid" by other contemporary reviewers, effectively ending Chopin's career.

Product Description: This volume illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras...read more

Product Description: A suffragist who wore pants. This is just the simplest of ways Dr. Mary Walker is recognized in the fields of literature, feminist and gender studies, history, psychology, and sociology.Perhaps more telling about her life are the words of an 1866 London Anglo-American Times reporter, "Her strange adventures, thrilling experiences, important services and marvelous achievements exceed anything that modern romance or fiction has produced...read more

Product Description: This volume gathers more than one hundred letters--most of them previously unpublished--written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). Warren, whose works include a three-volume history of the American Revolution as well as plays and poems, was a major literary figure of her era and one of the most important American women writers of the eighteenth century...read more

Product Description: The Sharon Harris Story is a miracle. Born in the inner city of South Central, Los Angeles, Sharon was working full-time, living with a drug dealer and mother of 2 children by age 14. Her young life was filled with abuse, neglect, and violence...read more

Product Description: Similar to the “digital revolution” of the last century, the colonial and early national periods were a time of improved print technologies, exploding information, faster communications, and a fundamental reinventing of publishing and media processes...read more

Product Description: During the long nineteenth century, American women editors of magazines, then the dominant mass medium for information in the United States, exerted a vital force over a burgeoning community of readers and were crucial in redefining women's identities and roles in the nation's changing social and cultural landscape...read more

Reflecting the history of the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this collection of narratives offers a women's perspective on early America in writings that discuss such topics as travel narratives, reportage, public and private virtue, rationalism, and the inequality between the sexes. Original.

Product Description: This is the annotated edition of novelist/journalist Rebecca Harding Davisís 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip, and a previously unpublished family history written for her children. The memoirs are not traditional autobiography; rather, they are Davis's perspective on the extraordinary cultural changes that occurred during her lifetime and of the remarkable--and sometimes scandalous--people who shaped the events...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: American Women Writers to 1800 advances our knowledge of early American culture. Including works by more than ninety women, many of whom have never before been published, this ambitious anthology captures the cultural and individual diversity of women's experiences in early America...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a "new era in female history," yet published her own writings under a man's name in hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas...read more

Product Description: From the late 1860s until her death in 1910, Rebecca Harding Davis was one of the best-known writers in America. She broke into print as a young woman in the 1860s with "Life in the Iron Mills," which established her as one of the pioneers of American realism...read more