UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition

Book Jacket: "Hawthorne and Women" edited by J.L. Idol Jr. and M.M. Ponder

Edited by John L. Idol Jr. and Melinda M. Ponder

Original essays examine Hawthorne in relation to women readers, critics, and writers

Nathaniel Hawthorne is notorious for complaining in a letter to one of his publishers that a "damn'd mob of scribbling women" was stealing his audience. Elsewhere, he referred to women authors as "ink-stained Amazons" who were "without a single exception, detestable," and once expressed his wish that all women be "forbidden to write, on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell."

This collection of original essays presents a more complex and positive view of Hawthorne's attitudes toward women, demonstrating his recognition of the crucial role that women played—as critics, reviewers, readers, and authors—in building a national readership that made his writing career so successful.

The book begins with an examination of the influence exerted by the women in Hawthorne's immediate family. It goes on to explore his links to a broad range of women writers, as well as his attitudes toward the female characters he created. Among the authors discussed are Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.

"Well written, concise, original essays. . . . A very useful contribution both to Hawthorne studies and gender studies."

Emily Budick, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
"A timely collection that I highly recommend. . . . This book has much to offer contemporary scholars, students of American literature, and Hawthorne specialists."

Sheila Post, author of Correspondent Colorings:
Melville and the Marketplace

John M. Idol Jr. is emeritus professor of English at Clemson University.

Melinda M. Ponder is professor of English at Pine Manor College.

Literary Studies / Women's Studies
336 pp.,
LC 98-28167
$60.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 1-55849-174-0
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-178-3
1999
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