Unlikely Heroines: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Woman Question

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Academic, May 14, 1987 - Literary Criticism - 163 pages
The unlikely heroines analyzed in this book are fictional women, who, like their male counterparts of the era, demonstrated an urge to break with tradition, a rejection of conventional values, and a desire for adventure. The six authors who created them--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Kate Chopin--at one time or another all received critical acclaim. However, their gender has prevented them, and their works, from being viewed as an integral part of the important literature of the time. The six novels discussed by Ann Shapiro have in comon a denail of the nineteenth-century ideal of true Womanhood in favor of greater freedom and equality for women.

From inside the book

Contents

Elizabeth Stuart
37
Louisa May Alcott
53
Sarah
71
Copyright

3 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1987)

ANN R. SHAPIRO is Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Farmingdale.

Bibliographic information