E.D.E.N. Southworth was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the nineteenth century and her Capitola Black, or Black Cap - a cross-dressing, adventure-seeking girl-woman - was so well-loved that the book was serialized three times between 1859 and 1888 and was dramatized in forty different versions. When we first meet sharp and witty Capitola she is living among beggars and street urchins, and dressed as a boy because a boy can get work and be safe, whereas a girl is left to starve for want of "proper" employment. Unknown to her, Capitola has a very rich elderly guardian who finds her at a providential moment and takes her back to his palatial mansion where she finds herself "decomposing above ground for want of having my blood stirred." But not to fear. There are bandits, true-loves, evil men, long-lost mothers, and sweet women friends in Capitola's future - not to mention thunder storms, kidnap attempts, and duels. The pace is fast, the action wonderfully unbelievable. This is escape literature at its nineteenth-century best, with a woman at its center who makes you feel strong, daring, and reckless.

 

Biography
Dobson graduated in 1963 from The King's College, New York gaining a degree in English. She later earned a master's from the University of New York at Albany in 1977 and a phD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1985. She taught at Amherst College and Tufts University before becoming a tenure-track professor at Fordham University. She founded a scholarly society devoted to Emily Dickinson and was a founding editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. She currently teaches Fulbright Fellowship International summer programs at Amherst College. She lives in Brewster, New York.[1]

Writing
Until recently Dobson's work has featured Karen Pelletier, an English professor at Enfield College in Enfield, Massachusetts, a fictionalized Amherst College. Pelletier is from working class Lowell and became an unmarried mother in high school and estranged from her family. She gets involved in cases involving manuscripts, writers and academia and often in liaison with the local police, specifically detective Charlie Piotrowski with whom she develops a personal relationship through the series.[1] In 2016, Dobson published the short story In The Attic, which continued Pelletier's story.

In 2012, Dobson announced a new series written in collaboration with Beverle Graves Myers set in World War II New York and featuring a seasoned homicide detective and two young women, a nurse and a reporter. The book, Face of The Enemy, was on the bestseller list of the Maine Sunday Telegram.[2]

In 2014, Dobson published The Kashmiri Shawl, her first historical fiction novel.

A startling yarn about cross-gender adventuring.— American Literature

This comic melodrama draws for its humor and our contemporary interest upon the heroine's cross-dressing and cross-gender identification.— Nineteenth-Century Literature

[Southworths] labyrinthine story of kidnap, missing heirs, villians called Black Donald, and Amazon heroinism still entertains. A blend of swashbuckler, Horatio Alger story, domestic sentimentalism, and thriller, her book offers fantasies of feminine invincibility. ... it must hhave titilated many a homebound matron.— Belles Lettres

The Hidden Hand was a runaway best-seller when it was published in 1859; for years afterward, daring parents named their daughters Capitola, venturous women. ... Fun to read and an excellent text for simultaneously demonstrating the existence of 19th-century literary stereotypes of women and showing how one writer reveled in exploding them.— Choice