In the "Stranger People's" Country tells the story of contact between a late-nineteenth-century Tennessee mountain community and an amateur archaeologist who wants to open the graves of the prehistoric "leetle stranger people," a source of myth to the mountaineers. A politician looking for votes in the country has invited the archaeologist Shattuck to travel into the mountains with him, but a mountain woman, Adelaide Yates, threatens to shoot anyone who attempts to violate the graves. The courageous mountaineer Felix Guthrie joins the defense of the "stranger people" and competes with...

We first meet Jason Auster when he climbs out of a stagecoach in a New England maritime town and, as it were, salutes destiny. A twenty-year-old house carpenter who has come adventuring, Jason hopes to "put in practice certain theories concerning the rights of men and property which had already made him a pest at home." And, indeed, theory and practice, destiny and self-determination are all following quite different paths as this antebellum story of love and power, incest and family honor, and sexual bonds and intractable conflicts between races and classes plays out against the backdrop of...

Written in the 1840s andpublished here for the first time, Julia Ward Howe s novel about a hermaphrodite is unlike anything of its time or, in truth, of our own. Narrated by Laurence, who is raised and lives as a man and is loved by men and women alike, yet can respond to neither, this unconventional story explores the realization that fervent hearts must borrow the disguise of art, if they would win the right to express, in any outward form, the internal fire that consumes them. Laurence describes his repudiation by his family, his involvement with an attractive widow, his subsequent...

Sukey Vickery's Emily Hamilton is an epistolary novel dealing with the courtship and marriages of three women. Originally published in 1803, it is one of the earliest examples of realist fiction in America and a departure from other novels at the turn of the nineteenth century. From the outset its author intended it as a realist project, never delving into the overly sentimental plotting or characterization present in much of the writing of Vickery's contemporaries. Emily Hamilton explores from a decidedly feminine perspective the idea of a woman's right to choose her own spouse and the...

Suffragist, lecturer, eugenicist, businesswoman, free lover, and the first woman to run for president of the United States, Victoria C. Woodhull (1838-1927 ) has been all but forgotten as a leading nineteenth-century feminist writer and radical. Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull is the first multigenre, multisubject collection of her materials, giving contemporary audiences a glimpse into the radical views of this nineteenth-century woman who advocated free love between consensual adults and who was labeled "Mrs. Satan" by cartoonist Thomas Nast. Woodhull's texts reveal the multiple...

In 1871 Jennie Collins became one of the first working-class American women to publish a volume of her own writings: Nature's Aristocracy. Merging autobiography, social criticism, fictionalized vignettes, and feminist polemics, her book examines the perennial problem of class in America. Collins loosely structures her series of sketches around the argument that nineteenth-century U.S. society, by deviating dangerously from the ideals set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, had created a corrupt aristocracy and a gulf between the rich and the poor that the United States' founders...

When Laura Curtis Bullard wrote the novel Christine in 1856, she created one of antebellum America s most radical heroines: a woman s rights leader. Addressing the major social, political, and cultural issues surrounding women from within an unusually overt feminist framework for its time, Christine openly challenges a social and legal system that denies women full and equal rights.Christine defies her family, rejects marriage, and leaves a job as a teacher to embark on her career, rewriting the script for a successful nineteenth-century heroine. Along the way, she recreates...