The concept of woman as having a distinctive nature and requiring a separate sphere of activity from that of man was pervasive in the thinking of nineteenth- century Americans. So dominant was this "horizon of expectations" for woman that the imaginations of our finest novelists were often subverted, even as they attempted to expand the possibilities for women through their fiction.

Selecting five American writers -- James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton -- Schriber traces the impact of cultural expectations for woman on the...