Description: "America is now wholly given over to a d -- d mob of scribbling women", wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in a famous 1855 line to his publisher, "and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash". This so-called "trash" has since been rediscovered by a new generation of feminist historians and literary critics who have redefined the significance of the fiction produced by nineteenth-century American women writers. The short story, with its flexible, innovative form and its responsiveness to scene, dialect, and regional and class conflicts, was the perfect medium for delineating the isolation and constriction in which so many women's lives were lived. "Literature", insisted Constance Fenimore Woolson, "must not refuse to deal with the ugly and the commonplace and even the shockingly unpleasant". By the century's end, the short story form had developed to an unprecedented level of sophistication and adaptability. Novelists of the highest distinction were able to find in it a means of exploring and extending their artistic range.

With stories by Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan Glaspell, Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, Scribbling Women introduces readers to a sampling of the best stories by nineteenth-century American women writers. In addition to the energy and intelligence revealed here, the pieces compiled share a wide-ranging imaginative vision and raise questions we are still debating today.
-- The best sampling available of the finest stories by19th-century American women writers.
-- Highlights the rich potential of the short story form.

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