Women writers are back on the page

It seems easy to forget that writers as modern as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton were both born in the 19th century. In the often rag-bag world of anthologies, this book, which takes its name from Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous complaint that "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women", is an important volume. American writers have long since laid claim to the short story as a national art form. Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" alone makes this book required reading. Whatever about Hawthorne's midcentury outburst, women writers had already enjoyed early success. "While American women writers have expressed discomfort with fame," argues Showalter, ". . . 19th century author-publisher relationships were relatively congenial to women." The English tradition proved a strong early influence; Jane Eyre was revered. But American women were soon drawing on their own historical, cultural and racial contexts. The Civil War was crucial and its impact inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott. The ten years 1855-65 has come to be seen as the "American Women's Renaissance". By the 1890s, local and regional writing was being developed by colourists such as the great Kate Chopin. Along with her, Wharton, Cather, Glaspell - who as a dramatist was compared with Eugene O'Neill - and others, such as Frances Harper, are all formidable. Yet by 1918, editors of the first literary history of the US were urging that "a truly American art . . . should embody the values of a manly culture". By 1960, F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance celebrated Hawthorne, Melville and Emerson as the founding fathers of the American literary tradition, relegating women to the margins. Unlike Jane Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot, their American counterparts were ignored. The impressive talents gathered here can no longer be overlooked.