Notes to WOMEN REGIONALISTS

¹ In the early 1980s, studies by feminist critics like Josephine Donovan and Emily Toth broke important new ground by asserting that regional writing had been persistently used by a group of interconnected (largely forgotten) women to defend "female values." [See Donovan's New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983) and Toth's edited volume, Regionalism and the Female Imagination: A Collection of Essays (New York: Human Sciences Press, Inc.: 1985)].  Donovan's provided a markedly new way of thinking about local color, one which provided a generation of scholars with a variety of intriguing paradigms on which to build (Local Color, 3). In the last few years, Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse culminated a decade of feminist recuperation with the release of a Norton Anthology volume, American Women Regionalists: 1850-1910, while other complementary smaller works continue to appear on women's traditions in specific sections of the United States--volumes like Ida Rae Egli's No Rooms of Their Own: Women Writers of Early California.

² "Introduction," Deephaven (1893); quoted in Cary ed. 32.

³ Among the works most useful for discussions of 19th-century New England women's literary production are: Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chpts, 4-6; Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. 283-334; Josephine Donovan, "Breaking the Sentence: Local-Color Literature and Subjugated Knowledges," in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-century Women Writers, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993): 226-43; Ann Douglas, "The Literature of Impoverishment: Women Local Colorists in America." Women's Studies 1 (1972): 3-45; Joan Hedrick, "Parlor Literature: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Question of 'Great Women Artists,'" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (Winter 1992): 275-303; June Howard, "Introduction: Sarah Orne Jewett and the Traffic in Words," in New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, June Howard, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 1-37; and Sandra A. Zagarell, "'America' as Community in Three Antebellum Village Sketches," in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-century Women Writers, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993): 143-63.

⁴ Harte, "The Rise of the Short Story," 241.

⁵ There are also several earlier examples. Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps each had critically depicted mill life in their respective regions--western Pennsylvania and northeastern Massachusetts--calling attention to the harshness of the lives of the new class of industrial workers in Life in the Iron Mills (1861) and Margaret Howth (1862), The Tenth of January (1868) and The Silent Partner (1871). I examine the boundaries of "Local Color" in relation more overtly polemical forms of Realism, particularly the "problem novel," in my discussion of Charles Chesnutt.

⁶ Brodhead, Cultures, chpt. 5.

⁷ Howard, "Introduction," New Essays: 1-37.

⁸ William Dean Howells, "A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction," The North American Review 173(December 1901): 832.

⁹ Rose Terry Cooke quoted by Elizabeth Ammons in "Introduction," How Celia Changed Her Mind & Selected Stories. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), xviii.

¹⁰ For Phelps' criticism of Jewett, see Donovan, New England Local Color Literature, 48; for Garland's censure of Jewett, see Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994), 231.

¹¹ An undated letter from her brother quoted in Edd Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock, 93.

¹² Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock, 116.

URL: http://www3.umassd.edu/users/dwebb/women_notes.html