Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings, Volume I

Timothy H. Scherman re-introduces modern readers to a nineteenth-century woman writer and political activist whose disappearance from literary history would seem impossible in light of the volume of her published writing and the visceral responses she elicited from readers in her own day. Collecting samples of her work in every genre--personal letters, short fiction, essays, lectures, editorial, memoir, excerpts from several novels and one of her plays--Scherman captures the full creative range of one of the earliest woman professionals in the literary field in three conveniently arranged volumes. Scherman's most intriguing admission in his editor's introduction constitutes the difference between this series and others like it in the recent recovery of women writers of Oakes Smith's era. While grounding the writer's life and work in the broad contours of U.S. and trans-Atlantic literary culture and suggesting thematic and political relations among Oakes Smith's variety of writings, these volumes advertise a still broadly open field of investigation, where even basic information that might lead to clearer understanding of Oakes Smith's success and latter-day disappearance await the scholar, the graduate student, or the amateur historian with access to a growing array of electronic archives at their fingertips, now including an expanded Oakes Smith website and EOS Log.