Exploring the wealth of writings by early American women in a broad spectrum of genres, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America presents one of the few synthetic approaches to early US women's writing. Through an examination of the strategic choices writers made as they constructed their authorial identities at a moment when ideals of both Author and Woman were in flux, Angela Vietto argues that the relationship between gender and authorship was dynamic: women writers drew on available conceptions of womanhood to legitimize their activities as writers, and, often simultaneously, drew on various conceptions of authorship to authorize discursive constructions of gender. Focusing on the half-century surrounding the Revolution, this study ranges widely over both well-known and more obscure writers, including Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Hannah Griffitts, Annis Boudinot Stockton, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Deborah Gannett, and Sarah Pogson Smith. The resulting analysis complicates and challenges a number of critical commonplaces, presenting instead a narrative of American literary history that presents the novel as women's entree into authorship; dichotomized views of civic and commercial authorship and of manuscript and print cultures; and a persistent sense that women of letters constantly struggled against a literary world that begrudged them entrance based on their gender.

Exploring the wealth of writings by early American women in a broad spectrum of genres, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America presents one of the few synthetic approaches to early US women's writing. Through an examination of the strategic choices writers made as they constructed their authorial identities at a moment when ideals of both Author and Woman were in flux, Angela Vietto argues that the relationship between gender and authorship was dynamic: women writers drew on available conceptions of womanhood to legitimize their activities as writers, and, often simultaneously, drew on various conceptions of authorship to authorize discursive constructions of gender. Focusing on the half-century surrounding the Revolution, this study ranges widely over both well-known and more obscure writers, including Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Hannah Griffitts, Annis Boudinot Stockton, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Deborah Gannett, and Sarah Pogson Smith. The resulting analysis complicates and challenges a number of critical commonplaces, presenting instead a narrative of American literary history that presents the novel as women's entree into authorship; dichotomized views of civic and commercial authorship and of manuscript and print cultures; and a persistent sense that women of letters constantly struggled against a literary world that begrudged them entrance based on their gender.

Hannah Webster Foster based The Coquette on the true story of Elizabeth Whitman, an unmarried woman who died in childbirth in New England. Fictionalising Whitman's experiences in her heroine, Eliza Wharton, Foster created a compelling narrative of seduction that was hugely successful with readers. The Boarding School, a less widely known work by Foster, is an experimental text, part epistolary novel and part conduct book. Together, the novels explore the realities of women's lives in early America. The critical introduction and appendices to this edition, which explore female friendship and the education of women in the novels, frame Foster as more than a purveyor of the sentimental novel, and re-evaluate her placement in American literary history.

A comprehensive anthology of writings 1500-1800 by explorers, colonists, and native Americans for use in courses on colonial or early American literature.