Somewhat later Lydia Maria Child developed as one of the first and foremost progressive writers. Having commenced her literary life with “Hobomok, a Story of the Pilgrims,” she later on devoted herself to the cause of woman and the abolition of slavery. She wrote a “History of Woman,” which was followed in 1833 by a strong “Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans,” the first anti-slavery work ever printed in book form in America. In 1841 she moved to New York and assisted her husband in editing “The National Anti-Slavery Standard.”
As is very generally known, her contemporary, Harriet Beecher Stowe, too, was interested in the question of abolition. In 1850 she wrote for the “National Era,” an anti-slavery paper, a serial entitled “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” When this novel was republished in book form it met with tremendous success. In the United States between 300,000 and 400,000 copies were sold within three years, and the printing press had to run day in and out to meet the demand. In Europe the book was devoured with the same deep interest. There are thirty-five different editions in English, and translations in at least twenty different languages. As the novel was also dramatized in various forms, it became a great factor in the abolishment of slavery.
Of the later stories by Mrs. Stowe “The Minister’s Wooing,” a tale of New England life in the latter part of the 18th Century, has been pronounced to be her best. But her reputation, while it lasts, will rest chiefly upon “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Sarah Margaret Fuller too belongs to those authors who espoused the cause of woman’s rights. In “The Dial,” a little quarterly journal, the organ of the transcendentalists and of the famous community at Brook Farm, she first published “The Great Lawsuit.” It formed the nucleus of a larger volume entitled “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.” Far in advance of the ideas of her times, it is with its noble sentiments and valuable hints a spirited plea for the rights of the female sex.
Elizabeth Ellet is favorably known for her valuable work “The Women of the American Revolution,” published in 1848 in three volumes. It was followed in 1850 by the “Domestic History of the American Revolution,” designed to give an inside view into the spirit of that period, and to describe the social and domestic conditions of the colonists and their feelings during the war.
Ann Sophia Stephens, and Emma D. Southworth were likewise immensely popular fiction writers during the first half of the 19th Century. So was Maria S. Cummins, who in “The Lamplighter” achieved a success comparable to that of Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom.”
The many short stories and novels of Mary Virginia Terhune, who wrote under the pseudonym of Marion Harland; the romances of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Miriam Coles Harris, Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, and Adeline Whitney, are now almost forgotten. Also the novels of Lydia Sigourney of Norwich, Connecticut, who holds the record of being one of the most prolific female writers in America. She produced not less than fifty-seven volumes, among them “Letters to Mothers”; “Water-Drops,” a contribution to the temperance-cause; “Pleasant Memories in Pleasant Lands”; “Pocahontas”; and “Traits of the Aborigines of America,” a descriptive poem in five cantos.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps enjoyed with her “Sunny Side” and other tales a phenomenal success. Her daughter, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, was in her time regarded as the greatest American woman novelist, who has most influenced the women of the United States. “The Silent Partner”; “Hedged In”; “Dr. Zay”; “The Story of Avis” as almost all other stories of the Phelps are laid in New England and exquisitely describe its nature, past, and present conditions.
Jane Goodwin Austin, Rose Terry Cooke, Annie Trumbull Slosson, Clara Louise Burnham, Alice Brown and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman belong also to the woman-authors whose works deal with colonial and present-day life in the New England States.
Of the woman-authors, who realized the possibilities of the romantic life and history of the early settlers and pioneers, Mary Johnston and Mary Hartwell Catherwood were the most successful. To the former we are indebted for the romances “Prisoners of Hope,” and “To Have and to Hold”; to the latter for the novels “The Lady of Fort St. John,” “The White Islander,” “Old Kaskaskia,” “Lazarre” and others.