| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South. By Catherine Kerrison. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. xvi, 265 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8014-4344-X.)

With Claiming the Pen, Catherine Kerrison provides an engaging and astute study of white women's literary world in the early South. Her work traces the transition from southern women's limited access to conduct literature and religious tracts in the colonial era to their enthusiasm for novels (as a form of advice as well as entertainment) in the late eighteenth century to their acquiring authorial confidence and skill in the early republic. Kerrison explains how what southern women read and wrote shaped not only their own self-identity but also the region's values. In confronting the difficult task of explaining how reading affected perception and action, Kerrison offers elegant—and convincing—analyses of the books read and writings crafted by several prominent southern women, including Hannah Lee Corbin, Martha Laurens Ramsay, and Elizabeth Foote Washington.

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