Uncommon Women discusses provocative, highly readable, nineteenth-century American texts that complicate notions of self-writing and female agency. This feminist study considers the generic forms, language, and illustrations of a group of complex and often daring texts, including Sarah Kemble Knight's unconventional travel Journal (1825); Fanny Fern's controversial newspaper essays (1851-72); Civil War nurse Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches (1863); and cross-dressed soldier's S. Emma E. Edmonds's Nurseand Spy in the Union Army (1865), along with later...