E.D.E.N. Southworth was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the nineteenth century and her Capitola Black, or Black Cap - a cross-dressing, adventure-seeking girl-woman - was so well-loved that the book was serialized three times between 1859 and 1888 and was dramatized in forty different versions. When we first meet sharp and witty Capitola she is living among beggars and street urchins, and dressed as a boy because a boy can get work and be safe, whereas a girl is left to starve for want of "proper" employment. Unknown to her, Capitola has a very rich elderly guardian who finds her at a providential moment and takes her back to his palatial mansion where she finds herself "decomposing above ground for want of having my blood stirred." But not to fear. There are bandits, true-loves, evil men, long-lost mothers, and sweet women friends in Capitola's future - not to mention thunder storms, kidnap attempts, and duels. The pace is fast, the action wonderfully unbelievable. This is escape literature at its nineteenth-century best, with a woman at its center who makes you feel strong, daring, and reckless

A nineteenth-century American missionary widow embarks on a daring quest to find her dark-skinned child. India, 1857: Anna Wheeler Roundtree, missionary wife, flees her husband's pious tyranny, leaving the safety of the Protestant Mission in which she's spent most of the past decade. Her timing is bad: the train carrying her to freedom steams into the midst of the brutal Indian Rebellion. She is, however, plucked from danger by Ashok Montgomery, a wealthy Anglo-Indian tea planter. Together they escape the angry mobs and find the shelter of an isolated mountain cave. There, for the first time, Anna learns the true nature of love. New York City, 1860: Now a successful poet featured in national magazines, Anna Wheeler is astonished to learn that the daughter she bore upon her return was not stillborn, as she was told, but has been kidnapped. When Anna hears the baby described as "dark-skinned," she realizes that Ashok, the man she'd left behind in the tumult of the rebellion, is the true father, not her blond, fair-skinned husband. In her own racially inflamed nation on the verge of its own war, Anna throws respectability to the wind, learns to take risks, break rules, and trust strangers in a determined search for the little girl. Then a deranged voice arises from her tormented past, making demands that compel her back to India. Anna must confront the evil that set her running in the first place. Will her daring quest for her child, and for the love of her life, end in triumph or in heartbreak?

Rejecting the view that interprets Emily Dickinson exclusively as a proto-modernist poet, Joanne Dobson finds Dickinson rooted in the expressive assumptions of her contemporary women writers. By looking at Dickinson in the context of these writers, Dobson uncovers the effects of common grounding in a cultural ethos of femininity that mandated personal reticence. Combining literary history and contemporary feminist literary theory, this study posits a complex interaction of personal preferences and editorial policies that resulted in a community of expression with impact on women's writing and literary careers.

Professor Karen Pelletier is up for tenure in the English Department. But when her one rival for the spota professor whose ethnicity gives him minority-preference statusis found dead, Karen in first on the list of suspects.