"But is it Any Good?": Evaluating Nineteenth-Century American Women's Fiction

Abstract

T HE revival of interest in nineteenth-century American women's literature is less than fifteen years old.1 Since Nina Baym published Woman's Fiction in 1978, it has become academically respectable to acknowledge interest in works like Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World or Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, and they are slowly becoming features of the academic terrain. Mary Kelley's Private Woman, Public Stage,2 Alfred Habegger's Gender, Fantasy, and Realism,3 Jane Tompkins' Sensational Designs,4 the articles in Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, and articles in Signs, American Quarterly, ESQ and others are all signposts to the new territories. But with the notable exception of Tompkins, few scholars have ven-