Kindred Hands, a collection of previously unpublished letters by women writers, explores the act and art of writing from diverse perspectives and experiences. The letters illuminate such issues as authorship, aesthetics, collaboration, inspiration, and authorial intent. By focusing on letters that deal with authorship, the editors reveal a multiplicity of perspectives on female authorship that would otherwise require visits to archives and special collections.
Representing some of the most important female writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including transatlantic correspondents, women of color, canonical writers, regional writers, and women living in the British empire, Kindred Hands will enliven scholarship on a host of topics, including reception theory, feminist studies, social history, composition theory, modernism, and nineteenth-century studies. Moreover, because it represents previously unpublished primary sources, the collection will initiate new discussions on race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender with an eye to writing at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Writers
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright [George Egerton]
Rhoda Broughton
Mary Cholmondeley
Marie Corelli
Rebecca Harding Davis
Mary Abigail Dodge [Gail Hamilton]
Jessie Redmon Fauset
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison [Lucas Malet]
Annesley Kenealy
Palma Pederson
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Henrietta Stannard
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Rosamund Marriott Watson [Graham R. Tomson]
“In Kindred Hands Jennifer Cognard-Black and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls have compiled an extraordinarily useful and lively collection of letters by major British and American literary women from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jessie Redmon Fauset. Energetic, imaginative, analytic, and keenly committed to their art, all these authors muse on the muse—and often with vivid candor on their own experiences of art and life—in writings that will be fascinating not only to the professional scholar but also to what Virginia Woolf called ‘the common reader.’”—Sandra M. Gilbert, coeditor, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
“Shedding light on women writers’ professional relationships, the politics of the literary marketplace, and the daily struggle to sustain a financially and artistically rewarding career, the letters in Kindred Hands provide valuable—and often poignant—materials toward a history of women's writing from 1865 to 1935.”—Talia Schaffer, associate professor, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
