American Literary Marketplace Research Articles

Authorial Designs: Daniel Berkeley Updike, Edith Wharton, and Institutional Reciprocity in the American Literary Marketplace

Abstract: Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860–1941) was an American printer whose Merrymount Press began operating in the 1890s out of Boston, aspiring to standards set by William Morris's Kelmscott Press in England. Central to Updike's success was his relationship with the writer Edith Wharton. Updike oversaw typographical design for four of Wharton's earliest works: The Decoration of Houses (1897), The Greater Inclination (1899), Crucial Instances (1901), and Sanctuary (1903). This essay examines the relationship between Updike and Wharton with an eye for American institutional exchange and argues Updike's design schemes helped engineer her reputation as a serious literary figure.

The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form

The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form

The strain of constraint

This article seeks to define and illustrate the notion of ‘constraint’ as it applies to literary translation. After a brief discussion of various ways in which the concept of constraint intersects with literary translation, the focus turns to the notion of ‘elasticity’, which describes tensions exerted upon the translator by factors particular to a given translation project, whether these are stylistic, formal, lexical, or intentional literary constraints. This tension forces the translator to work ‘otherwise’ and dictates to a certain extent where the translator must situate him or herself along a continuum of ‘faithfulness’ that ranges from material form to semantic meaning. Four examples are taken from the author’s own work as a literary translator, drawing on translations of ‘constrained’ texts of progressive difficulty by Marcel Schwob, Raymond Queneau, Olivier Salon, and J.-A. Soubira. Finally, this illustration of varying textual elasticity and constraint is examined from a sociological angle, which seeks to explore practical constraints of literary translation in today’s American literary marketplace.

Melville in his own time: a biographical chronicle of his life, drawn from recollections, interviews, and memoirs by family, friends, and associates

Owing to the decline of his contemporary fame and to decades of posthumous neglect, Herman Melville remains enigmatic to readers despite his status as one of AmericaAEs most securely canonical authors. Born into patrician wealth but plunged into poverty as a child, in 1840 he signed aboard the whaleship Acushnet in the midst of a nationwide depression and sailed to the South Pacific. At the Marquesas Islands, he deserted and lived for a time among one of the groupAEs last unsubjugated tribes. Upon his return home, he achieved overnight success with a book based on his experiences, Typee (1846). MelvilleAEs mastery of the English language and heterodox views made him a source of both controversy and fascination to western readers, until his increasing commitment to artistry and contempt for artificial conventions led him to write Moby-Dick (1851) and its successor Pierre (1852). Although the former is considered his masterwork today, the books offended mid-nineteenth-century cultural sensibilities and alienated Melville from the American literary marketplace. The resulting eclipse of his popular reputation was deepened by his voluntary withdrawal from society, so that obituaries written after his death in 1891 frequently expressed surprise that he hadnAEt died long before. With most of his personal papers and letters lost or destroyed, his library of marked and annotated books dispersed, and first-hand accounts of him scattered, brief, and frequently conflicting, MelvilleAEs place in American literary scholarship illustrates the importance of accurately edited documents and the value of new information to our understanding of his life and thought. As a chronologically organized collection of surviving testimonials about the author, Melville in His Own Time continues the tradition of documentary research well-exemplified over the past half-century by the work of Jay Leyda, Merton M. Sealts, and Hershel Parker. Combining recently discovered evidence with new transcriptions of long-known but rarely consulted testimony, this collection offers the most up-to-date and correct record of commentary on Melville by individuals who knew him.

The Making of Jose Garcia Villa's Footnote to Youth

This article recounts the story behind the publication of Villa’s stories and his book Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933) in the United States. First, the conditions of the American literary marketplace are briefly described. Second, documents pertaining to the realization in print of Villa’s stories and his book are analyzed as sites of negotiations between colonial subject (Villa) and the colonial master (his American editors and publishers). Finally, an account of how Villa was made to circulate in the Philippines after the publication of his stories and his book in the United States is given. From these discussions the article hopes to show that Villa’s self-fashioning by publication was both subject to and critical of the colonial condition, alternately reinforcing it and challenging it.

The Drama of Gender and Genre in Edith Wharton’s Realism

Research Article| December 01 2012 The Drama of Gender and Genre in Edith Wharton’s Realism Regina Martin Regina Martin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2012) 58 (4): 582–605. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-1009 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Regina Martin; The Drama of Gender and Genre in Edith Wharton’s Realism. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2012; 58 (4): 582–605. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-1009 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

HISTORICIZING AMERICAN TRAVEL, AT HOME AND ABROAD

In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel.A Trip to Cubaappeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana's story of his “vacation voyage,”To Cuba and Back. These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military “filibusters.” Howe's narrative demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. “I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,” she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 “sprightly” pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of “foreign” institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores.

Establishing Routes for Fiction in the United States: Walter Scott’s Novels and the Early Nineteenth-Century American Publishing Industry

Establishing Routes for Fiction in the United StatesWalter Scott’s Novels and the Early Nineteenth-Century American Publishing Industry Emily B. Todd (bio) I On 15 August 1871, the centenary of the birth of Walter Scott, an editorial writer for the Boston Daily Evening Transcript recalled the stir the Waverley novels had created in the 1820s: Some fifty years ago (there are those alive to remember them as incidents of boyhood and early manhood) Boston had sensations every few months, on the arrivals of packet ships from Liverpool. These were the signals for the appearances of new “Waverleys,” in what was then a marvellously short time, from the press of Wells & Lilly. The two volumes hurried up for publication were not remarkable specimens of book-making or book-binding; yet . . . no gems, assuredly no literary gems, were ever more eagerly sought, more avariciously coveted. Happy the men and women who got from the besieged circulating library or the bookseller’s counter the earliest copies, and could boast of being the first to devour the latest production of the pen of the “Magician,” so called for the rapidity as well as fascination of his creations.1 Even though the novels appeared insignificant in form (they were “not remarkable specimens of book-making”), this editorial characterizes them as [End Page 100] foundational to the country’s literary culture. The books were catalysts for collective experience—everyone waited for them, everyone wanted them, and everyone talked about them. In the editorialist’s account, these “Waverleys” entered the country as books produced by the British press but were then “hurried up for publication” by Wells and Lilly for the Boston literary market. They became American books (two volumes, not three)2 and animated the literary marketplace, as publishers raced to print them, booksellers and “besieged” libraries stocked them, and men and women, as well as boys and girls, read them hungrily. This remembrance could have appeared in papers in Philadelphia or New York, where publishers also competed to reprint Scott’s novels. Mathew Carey’s Philadelphia firm got in the business of publishing Scott’s novels early on, in 1818, and other publishers in Philadelphia and New York also brought out the Waverley novels in the 1810s and ’20s. The popularity of Scott in America, of course, is not news, and yet the importance of this popularity has been largely neglected in recent scholarship on print culture about the period.3 This article begins to redress this neglect through an analysis of publishers’ correspondence from the 1810s and ’20s and an analysis of evidence from Philadelphia periodicals that printed reviews and notices about the novels. My focus is on Carey, whose firm’s publishing correspondence is housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, but I also discuss other key players in the early publishing of Scott, including the Boston publishers Wells and Lilly and Samuel Parker, as well as the New York publishers Harper and Brothers, James Eastburn, and Van Winkle and Wiley. As these firms discussed publishing the Waverley novels, they established connections with one another, confirmed new interest in the genre of the novel, and developed routes and new modes of distribution for fiction. The periodical reviews supported this new interest in the genre, as reviews promoted the high morals of Scott’s novels and published anecdotes detailing readers’ excitement about them. By focusing on the contributions of a British author to the development of the American literary marketplace, I am participating in the effort to reimagine American and British literary relations in the nineteenth century. The past decade has seen a transatlantic turn in literary studies, as scholars have reconsidered literary careers in a transatlantic rather than a national context. As Pascale Casanova argues in The World Republic of Letters, the transatlantic or global literary field has been “long obscured by the quasi-systematic national (and therefore political) appropriation of literary stature.”4 But new scholarship is trying now to illuminate this transatlantic literary field. Instead of offering influence studies or accounts of British literature [End Page 101] stifling the growth of American literature, new studies in the “world republic of letters” examine transatlantic literary relations in more reciprocal ways...

Mediums of Exchange: Fanny Fern's Unoriginality

Mediums of Exchange:Fanny Fern's Unoriginality Lara Langer Cohen (bio) Who is FANNY FERN? and, What is FANNY FERN? —"Interesting to Ladies," Pittsfield Sun, 22 September 1853 In 1849, the editor and critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold followed the success of his anthologies The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and The Prose Writers of America (1847) with The Female Poets of America, an expanded version of his Gems from American Female Poets (1844). Griswold's was one of three popular anthologies of women's poetry that appeared in quick succession in the late 1840s, signaling along with the success of women's popular novels an unmistakable shift in the gender composition of the American literary marketplace.1 In his introduction, Griswold commends women for showing "indications of the infusion of our domestic spirit and temper into literature" and for their affinity for pursuits that "beautify existence but do not consolidate power"—and yet his critical faculties are discomfited by women's literary accomplishments. It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men. The moral nature of women, in its finest and richest development, partakes of some of the qualities of genius; it assumes, at least, the similitude of that which in men is the characteristic or accompaniment [End Page 59] of the highest grade of mental inspiration. We are in danger, therefore, of mistaking for the efflorescent energy of creative intelligence, that which is only the exuberance of personal "feelings unemployed." . . . The most exquisite susceptibility of the spirit, and the capacity to mirror in dazzling variety the effects which circumstances or surrounding minds work upon it, may be accompanied by no power to originate, nor even, in any proper sense, to reproduce.2 Women's emotional susceptibility, according to Griswold, uncannily mimics the effects of men's artistic talent, putting the critic's habitual discernment "in danger." We could unpack Griswold's anxieties about the interchangeability of literary greatness and female sentiment, not to mention his fear that literary women do not "reproduce" in the "proper sense," at some length. For my purposes, what is most interesting about his ambivalent introduction is its nervousness about the origins of women's writing—or, more to the point, its nervous suspicion that this writing has no origins at all but simply "assumes" the "similitude" of "mental inspiration." Griswold's concerns about recognizing the "genuineness of literary ability in women" can help us excavate a contemporaneous discourse that saw in these writers, not an authentic selfhood, as is generally held, but an intrinsic fraudulence. In order to do so, I focus my analysis on the novelist and newspaper columnist Fanny Fern, the pen name of Sara Payson Willis, whose enormous popularity put her at the center of debates around women's authorship. Fern belonged to a rash of midcentury newspaper writers whose flowery, alliterative, obvious pseudonyms—Fanny Forrester, Grace Greenwood, Minnie Myrtle, Lily Larkspur, Bell Bramble, Jenny June—focused Griswold's concerns by defining their owners, to borrow Ann Douglas's phrase, as "purely fictional."3 Fern's writing has, until quite recently, been largely absent from discussions of American literary history, but this omission would have greatly surprised her contemporaries, who devoured her writings in [End Page 60] the New York Ledger, where she was the highest paid newspaper columnist of her time (at a newspaper that boasted the highest circulation of its time); who made her novel Ruth Hall a runaway bestseller; who enthusiastically named waltzes, boats, and children after her; who made her true identity the subject of heated debate and, even after it was revealed, energetically impersonated her in print, in photographs, and on the lecture circuit. As one of the many articles catering to popular curiosity announced, the question of the day was "Who is FANNY FERN? and, What is FANNY FERN?"4 I want to pursue the possibility that the writer's shift from "who" to "what"—from human to thing, from subject to object, and the very uncertainty the slippage implies—is just as revealing as the rest of the article's disclosures about Fern. Griswold's image of women writers who "mirror" their surroundings "in...

Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper Holly M. Kent (bio) Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper. By Jacqueline Bacon. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Pp. 324. Paper, $29.95.) On March 16, 1827, Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm published the inaugural issue of Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper in the United States. The newspaper, Cornish and Russwurm informed their readers, was designed to address a particularly troubling gap in the contemporary American literary marketplace. Although 1820s America boasted a diverse, almost dizzying assortment of periodical literature, there was still no newspaper explicitly created by, and for, free African Americans. "We wish," Cornish and Russwurm wrote in their debut issue, "to plead our cause. Too long have others spoken for us" (13). In her new monograph, Jacqueline Bacon examines Cornish and Russwurm's efforts to create a forum in which African Americans could "speak for themselves," demonstrating the significant impact Freedom's Journal had on the development of an independent black print culture, and the evolution of African American rhetoric and ideologies about slavery, civil rights, and self-determination in the early republic. Freedom's Journal, Bacon argues, constituted the beginnings of a truly independent black press, in which African Americans could forge community connections, construct new rhetorics about freedom and slavery, and "contribute to discussions and debates about issues important to them" (8). In the often viciously racist, white-controlled print culture of the early republic, Freedom's Journal was a vitally important new site for community cohesion, offering black business owners a place to advertise [End Page 737] their businesses, self-help and charitable organizations a venue in which to publicize their activities, and authors a new site in which to publish their literary work. It fostered African Americans' civic consciousness, publishing pieces that encouraged black men to educate themselves about, and work to assert, their voting rights, and highlighted the many obstacles facing African Americans seeking to claim their civil rights in America's (ostensibly free) society. Recognizing the close ties between literacy and citizenship, Freedom's Journal's editors and contributors encouraged African American women and men to pursue their educations, join literary societies, and sharpen their rhetorical skills by writing pieces for the newspaper's pages. In an era in which the majority of newspapers took fierce partisan stands in favor of one particular cause or party, Freedom's Journal was unique, Bacon affirms, in that it opened its pages to a truly diverse assortment of voices and views. Although the paper was staunchly anticolonizationist for most of its existence, for example, its editors nonetheless published numerous pieces in favor of colonization, offering readers the opportunity to weigh the merits of both sides of this and many other arguments. Even after Russwurm (who served as the paper's sole editor after Cornish's resignation in September 1827) adopted the colonizationist cause, he continued to print pieces critiquing the movement until the paper's demise, and his departure for Liberia, in 1829. In the first section of her monograph, Bacon skillfully situates Freedom's Journal in the political, social, and cultural context from which the paper emerged, concisely yet thoroughly discussing the development of free black communities in northern cities in the years between the Revolution and the emergence of Freedom's Journal. While the 1820s are justly seen as a low point in American race relations, with free African Americans facing increasing mob violence and organizations such as the American Colonization Society emerging and flourishing, Bacon cautions historians against depicting Freedom's Journal's emergence primarily as a reaction to an undeniably racist society and print culture. Although Freedom's Journal provided an important forum in which to combat such racism, the newspaper, Bacon stresses, was not created primarily in response to racist attacks, but rather to promote civic education and empowerment, to foster racial pride, and to encourage community unity. Having provided a brief but detailed overview of Freedom's Journal's historical context and publication history, Bacon embarks on five chapters [End Page 738] that examine the content of the paper in depth, considering the issues of self-help, gender roles, contemporary perceptions of Africa...

Reclaiming the Non-Canonical Nineteenth Century

Since the 1970s critics have been reclaiming nineteenth-century popular women's literature from the label it received at the hands of canonical great Nathaniel Hawthorne: "a damned mob of scribbling women." Nina Baym's Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820-1870 was instrumental in this effort, and as Baym points out, the categories of popular literature and women's literature often overlapped in the nineteenth century when women writers writing for women dominated the American literary marketplace. Anne Sophie Riepma's Fire & Fiction: Augusta Jane Evans in Context contributes to the reclamation of nineteenth-century popular women writers by exploring the works of one of the most popular ones. Two other new studies, however, broaden the critical net slightly by including popular male writers of the nineteenth century and a rather unpopular female writer. Alice Fahs, in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865, records and analyzes the most popular works written by men and women and for an audience of men, women, and children during the Civil War, and Stephen Howard Browne, in Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical [End Page 155] Imagination, examines one of the most important women writers and orators of the nineteenth century who was more infamous than popular.

Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-Century American Literary Marketplace: Antebellum Richmond Readers and the Collected Editions of the Waverley Novels

Previous articleNext article No AccessWalter Scott and the Nineteenth-Century American Literary Marketplace: Antebellum Richmond Readers and the Collected Editions of the Waverley NovelsEmily B. ToddEmily B. Todd Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 93, Number 4DECEMBER 1999 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.93.4.24304184 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref COPYRIGHT © 1999 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Günter Leypoldt Degrees of Public Relevance, Modern Language Quarterly 77, no.33 (Sep 2016): 369–393.https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-3570645Ronald J. Zboray, Mary Saracino Zboray The History of the Book, (Dec 2012).https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444361506.wbiems008ALEXANDER HAMMOND Poe, Scott's Fiction, and the Holt Source Collection: The Example of Ivanhoe and “The Fall of the House of Usher“, Resources for American Literary Study 34, no.11 (Jan 2009): 47–71.https://doi.org/10.2307/resoamerlitestud.34.2009.0047ALEXANDER HAMMOND Poe, Scott's Fiction, and the Holt Source Collection: The Example of Ivanhoe and “The Fall of the House of Usher“, Resources for American Literary Study 34, no.11 (Jan 2009): 47–71.https://doi.org/10.2307/26367239

The First New Yorker! The Smart Set Magazine, 1900-1924

The archival record indicates that the Smart Setmagazine played a no less revolutionary role in the American literary marketplace than its well-known successor the New Yorker, and that in the years leading up to the postwar American literary renaissance, this mass-market magazine introduced more American readers than any other magazine of the period to the particular writers, the literary trends, and the critical ideas which would prove to be key factors in the development of American modernism.

Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860-1900

Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860-1900

Charles Johanningsmeier. <italic>Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860–1900</italic>. (Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 284. $54.95

Journal Article Charles Johanningsmeier. Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860–1900. (Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 284. $54.95 Get access Johanningsmeier Charles. Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860–1900. (Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 284. $54.95. Ronald J. Zboray Ronald J. Zboray Georgia State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 103, Issue 4, October 1998, Pages 1333–1334, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/103.4.1333-a Published: 01 October 1998

Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860-1900

Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860-1900

Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860-1900.

Acknowledgements Introduction Newspaper syndicates of the late nineteenth century: overlooked forces in the American literary marketplace 1. Preparing the way for the syndicates: a revolution in American fiction production, distribution, and readership, 1860-1900 2. The pioneers: readyprint, plate service, and early galley-proof syndicates 3. The heyday of American fiction syndication: Irvin Bacheller, S. S. McClure and other independent syndicators 4. What literary syndicates represented to authors: saviours, doctors, or something in between? 5. What price must authors pay? The negotiations between galley-proof syndicates and authors 6. Pleasing the customers: the balance of power between syndicates and newspaper editors 7. Readers' experiences with syndicated fiction 8. The decline of the literary syndicates Notes Bibliography.

Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860-1900

Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860-1900

Fiction and the American literary marketplace: the role of newspaper syndicates, 1860-1900

Fiction and the American literary marketplace: the role of newspaper syndicates, 1860-1900

Kate Chopin's Scribbling Women and the American Literary Marketplace

I want book to succeed, Kate Chopin wrote in an 1894 diary entry about her f t short story collection, Bayou Folk. Five years later -- despite disappointing reviews of her novel, Awakening -- she nonetheless queried her publisher, Herbert Stone, What are prospects for book?(1) Chopin's private and public writings confirm that she considered herself professional writer. But her sense of herself as woman writer, her comprehension of women's tradition, and her relationship with her foremothers -- that d_____d mob of scribbling Hawthorne lamented in 1850s -- are other, perhaps more interesting, questions.(2) In Private Woman Public Stage, Mary Kelley documents publishing travails of mid-nineteenth-century scribbling women, literary domestics whose professional identities were upstaged by primary self-identification as private domestic women.(3) And in Doing Literary Business, Susan Coultrap-McQuin finds that Chopin's foremothers, despite formidable success and devout career commitment, still had to contend with limiting stereotypes of women.[4] Thus it seems surprising that Chopin, who inherited these stereotypes when she began writing in 1890s, would also propagate them. In three career-spanning works -- Witherwell's Mistake, Awakening, and Stock's One Story -- chopin satirizes women writers in ways that strongly imply she wished to dissociate herself from traditional female litterateur.(5) These caricatures provide insight not only into Chopin's own career but also into status of female professional writer in late nineteenth-century America. Chopin specifically ridiculed women writers in only three works, but as Barbara Ewell notes, even her first novel At Fault (1890) managed to manipulate effectively techniques of romance [read women's popular fiction] to mock its conventions.(6) Elizabeth Ammons has proposed that Chopin belonged to group of writers in 1890s who desired to be artists as well as professionals. Breaking with past, these women assailed the territory of high art traditionally posted in Western culture as exclusive property of privileged white men.[7] In light of this premise, Chopin seems less atypical in her censure of scribbling women. Willa Cather, for example, claimed she expected little of women writers until they could produce a stout sea tale, manly battle yam, anything without wine, women and love.(8) Ironically, Cather treated Awakening to similarly uncharitable review. Objecting to its trite retelling of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Cather (in revealing trope) compares Chopin's narrative decisions to man acquiring mate: An author's choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write.[9] Cather's criticism, however, might be considered poetic justice, since Chopin had herself dunned her sister scribblers. Her first parody of woman, Witherwell's Mistake, was completed in November 1889 at beginning of her apprenticeship. Chopin's third published story, it appeared in February 1891 in St. Louis magazine Fashion and Fancy.[10] Echoing spirit of Hawthorne's oftquoted remark, Witherwell's Mistake derides scribbling women's trash and mocks their female readers. story recounts career of Miss Frances Witherwell, an unmarried journalist of seasoned age who contributes fiction and women's articles to small-town newspaper, Boredomville Battery. Notwithstanding Chopin's gesture in christening her character Wither-well, she also derides female journalist's hackneyed production: flagrantly Southern tale[s] of passion and self-important essays like The Wintering of Canaries, Security Against Moth (CW, p. …