American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869

Melissa J. Homestead is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She held the Mellon Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. Her work has appeared in Prospects, New England Quarterly, Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, and Jewett and Her Contemporaries. In 2003, she directed the third Catharine Maria Sedgwick Symposium.

• Introduction: 'lady-writers' and 'copyright, authors, and authorship' in nineteenth-century America; 1. Authors, wives, slaves: coverture, copyright, and authorial dispossession, 1831–1869; 2. Suited to the market: Catharine Sedgwick, female authorship, and the literary property debates, 1822–1842; 3. When I can read my title clear: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Stowe v. Thomas Copyright Infringement case (1853); 4. Every body sees the theft: Fanny Fern and periodical reprinting in the 1850s; 5. A 'rank rebel' lady and her literary property: Augusta Jane Evans and copyright, the Civil War and after, 1861–1868; ; Epilogue. Belford v. Scriber (1892) and the ghost of Mary Virginia Terhune's Phemie's Temptation (1869); or, the lessons of the 'lady-writers' of the 1820's through the 1860s for literary history and twenty-first-century copyright law.

Review of the hardback: 'With American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869, scholarship on relationships among authorship, copyright, the state and the status of literature in America takes a major step forward. Melissa Homestead's beautifully researched, elegantly written study traces the very different ways in which five successful white women writers manoeuvred within coverture - which applied to women only - and economic and legal circumstances experienced by all antebellum American writers. Homestead not only shows how essential gender is to any account of American literary history worth its salt; she models the kind of intensive historical research required for understanding how property rights, gender and race played out in individual writers' work and lives.' Sandra A. Zagarell, Longman Professor of English, Oberlin College