Kindred Hands ― Letters on Writing by British And American Women Authors, 1865-1935

Kindred Hands, a collection of previously unpublished letters by such prominent writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Frances E. W. Harper, explores the act and art of writing from diverse perspectives and experiences. The features women's letters that detail the experience of writing within an Anglo-American literary marketplace that was oftenimpersonally professional, nationalistic, and antagonistic. The letters address the pragmatics of writing - a crucial element of nineteenth-century women's negotiations of the public and private spheres - and illuminate such issues as authorship, aesthetics, collaboration, inspiration, and authorial intent. By focusing on letters that deal with the process and product of authorship, the editors give students, teachers, and scholars access to 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 Moreover, because it represents previously unpublished primary sources, the collection will initiate new discussions on race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender with an eye to writing at the turn of the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.

Jennifer Cognard-Black, an assistant professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland, is the author of Narrative in the Professional Age: Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and a coauthor of Advancing Rhetoric. Elizabeth MacLeod Walls teaches in the Department of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University and serves as the executive director of a Lilly Endowment grant supporting continuing education in Nebraska.