| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Across an Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time. By Julia Markus. (New York: Knopf, 2000. xii, 331 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-679-44599-4.)

Historians in search of lively bedside reading will find Across an Untried Sea "as fascinating as any novel." On view are four major and a bevy of minor British and American female artists and authors of the mid-nineteenth century, chiefly the sculptors Harriet Hosmer and Emma Stebbins, the actress Charlotte Cushman, and Jane Welsh Carlyle—a "major" because her husband, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle, "insured Jane's immortality by preserving her literary legacy; she is today considered one of the finest letter writers of the period." 1

Whether letters are "literature" I am not qualified to judge, but certainly they are the raison d'être of this book. In addition to the letters of Jane Carlyle, Cushman, Stebbins, and Hosmer, Across an Untried Sea utilizes those of and books about the writers Geraldine Jewsbury, Anne Hampton Brewster, Francis Power Cobbe, Eliza Cook, Isa Blagden, Kate Field, Adelaide Procter, Margaret O. W. Oliphant, Matilda Hays, and Grace Greenwood, plus five women (Lady Louisa Ashburton, Emma Crow Cushman, Rosalie Sully, Louisa Oakley, and Ann "Nannie" Lemmon) whose claims to attention here are their sexual connections to Cushman and/or members of her family or "circle" . . . and, of course, the survival of letters. . . .

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