The three essays that comprise this volume explore literary representations of the 'True Womanhood' ideology, a narrative through which nineteenth-century women could invest their existence and their role in the world with meaning and purpose. In Victorian America, middle-to-upper-middle-class women were not admitted to centers of public power. Being relegated to the private sphere, i.e., the domestic milieu, they had only one socially respectable function - that of a wife and mother - while the masculine sphere of action was the public one, the realm of business and politics. This rigid role...