| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. By Anne E. Boyd. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xii, 305 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8018-7875-6.)
Anne E. Boyd's study of Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stoddard, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps claims that these writers began to think of themselves after the Civil War as artists and only secondarily as women, although their antebellum predecessors had denied wishing to be anything but good women. Boyd sees these women representing a larger group, including Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, Emily Dickinson, and a number of others, who were of white, middle-class origins, had family support and access to education, and did not have to work for a living. She also argues that these writers inhabited the same sphere of high culture as men, unlike the previous and subsequent generations of women authors.	1
Boyd does not grapple with the aesthetic merits of these women's work, equating high culture with publication in and praise from the Atlantic. Stoddard, Woolson, Alcott, and Phelps did appear from time to time and were sometimes reviewed favorably in the Atlantic, although their relationships with the magazine often seemed to me less to sustain their ambitions than to play with them.	. . .

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