Introduction
In the mid 1850s, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a letter
to his publisher angrily lashing out at the "damned
mob of scribbling women" whose books often
sold in the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands,
driving more deserving writers (such as Hawthorne)
out of the literary marketplace. His now-often-quoted
and intemperate private comment was later recuperated
and institutionalized as part of a general campaign
against nineteenth-century American women writers
in particular and women's writing in general. Thus,
at the beginning of the twentieth century, the novelist
Frank Norris could announce that women may have
been writing more fiction than men, but they were
not writing better fiction. They lacked, he proclaimed,
the necessary involvement with experience-with "life
itself, the crude, the raw, the vulgar"-that
was the basis for great and enduring literature.
Moreover, he insisted, women lacked the physical
and psychological stamina to produce great fiction.
They succumbed too easily to "fatigue, harassing
doubts, more nerves, a touch of hysteria occasionally,
exhaustion, and in the end complete discouragement
and a final abandonment of the enterprise."
During the past several decades, many literary historians
and critics have devoted considerable energy to
challenging and overturning these earlier literary
and social judgments. As part of the ongoing process
of reevaluation and literary recovery, the stories
in this series and their radio dramatizations demonstrate
just how wrong, how blind, Norris and other earlier
critics and writers have been in their assessments
of American women writers. Here are fifteen compelling
examples of "life itself" in all its different
shades, rendered with great vividness and complexity
by women who pursued lifelong, successful careers
as writers of fiction. In spite of dismissive comments,
their works endured. The renewed study and attention
these works are receiving today is the best evidence
of how full of life they are.
-Lucinda H. MacKethan
North Carolina State University
-James A.
Miller
George Washington University
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