Introduction by Elaine Showalter
The Mothers of Us all

Since they first began to appear in print over 350 years ago, American women writers have publicly insisted that they did not care about literary fame or immortality. Anne Bradstreet, whose book The Tenth Muse Newly Sprung Up in America was published in 1650, declared that she was contented with her humble domestic niche as a Puritan housewife and mother, and denied any interest in winning the laurel wreath or other poetic awards. If men did her the honor of reading her poems, she wrote, "Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays." In other words, Bradstreet was content to be the Poet Parsleyate, rather than the Poet Laureate, and her imagery of the kitchen of Parnassus would be echoed by many American women writers who came after her.

Hoping for fame seemed unfeminine and self-aggrandizing, and they denied that such ambition inspired them to write. Rather than admitting their own ambitions, promoting their own creativity, or claiming their place in their nation's literary history, the founding mothers of American literature were more likely to avoid publicity and to deprecate their own achievements. They published anonymously or under a pseudonym, and they wrote conflicted accounts of their own longings to write. Lydia Maria Child signed her first novel, Hobomok (1824), "By an American"; she had been warned "that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book." Child ruefully noted in her diary that for Christmas her husband had given her a laurel wreath, but "the leaves . . . were not very abundant."

When reviews of their works were scanty or harsh, women writers suffered in silence. But American male writer...