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By Anne E. Boyd. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004. 320 pp. $55.00.
In Writing for Immortality, Anne E. Boyd focuses on the lives, literary work, and personal and professional struggles of four authors whose careers spanned the postbellum period: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. The postbellum era was a transitional period for American women writers -- a time between the enormous success of the sentimentalists and the solidification of literary writing as the exclusive realm of male artists by the end of the century. In her examination of this overlooked period, Boyd challenges the commonly held assumption that women's literature of the nineteenth century was devoted primarily to didactic fiction and that Edith Wharton was one of the first female authors who was a "serious artist" (247). Boyd successfully reconstructs the era through an examination of the historical evidence, ranging from letters, diaries, reviews, essays, and literary social events, and close readings of the fiction of Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson to demonstrate that these pioneering artists took an active role in contemporary discussions on the nature of genius and art.
In the first chapter, Boyd argues that her subjects dreamed...