Objects of Liberty explores the prevalence of souvenirs in British women’s writing during the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. It argues that women writers employed the material and memorial object of the souvenir to circulate revolutionary ideas and engage in the masculine realm of political debate. While souvenir collecting was a standard practice of privileged men on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, women began to partake in this endeavor as political events in France heightened interest in travel to the Continent. Looking at travel accounts by Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine and Martha Wilmot, Charlotte Eaton, and Mary Shelley, this study reveals how they used souvenirs to affect political thought in Britain and contribute to conversations about individual and national identity. At a time when gendered beliefs precluded women from full citizenship, they used souvenirs to redefine themselves as legitimate political actors. Objects of Liberty is a story about the ways that women established political power and agency through material culture.

“When Luisa Igloria cites Epictetus—‘as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place’—she introduces the crowded and contradictory world her poems portray: a realm of transience, yes, where the vulnerable come to harm and everything disappears, but also a scene of tremendous, unpredictable bounty, the gloriously hued density this poet loves to detail. ‘I was raised / to believe not only the beautiful can live on / Parnassus,’ she tells us, and she makes it true, by including in the cyclonic swirl of her poems practically everything: a gorgeous, troubling over-brimming universe."
—Mark Doty, judge for the 2014 Swenson Award

The May Swenson Poetry Award, an annual competition named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America's most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her hometown.

A carefully rendered portrait of a brilliant but troubled daughter of the Old South who struggled against the conventions of gender, class, family, and ultimately of sanity, yet survived to define a creative life of her own
 
Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama’s governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Returning to Alabama during the Depression, she briefly managed the family landholdings before departing for New York City where she became involved in the theater. Inventing a plastic compound while working on theatrical sets, she applied for a patent and set her sights on a livelihood as an inventor and businesswoman. With the advent of World War II, Mayfield returned to her family home in Tuscaloosa where she expanded her experiments, freelanced as a journalist, and doggedly pursued a bizarre series of military and intelligence schemes, prompting temporary hospitalization. In 1945, she mingled with a host of cultural figures, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and even a young John F. Kennedy, while reporting on the creation of the United Nations from Mexico and California. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she struggled to find her way with both work and family, becoming increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years.

Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the ambition that had driven her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts—sometimes delusional, always savvy—to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At 59, she was released from Bryce and later obtained a decree of “having been restored to sanity,” enabling her to manage her own financial affairs and to live how and where she pleased. She went on to publish noteworthy literary biographies of the Menckens and the Fitzgeralds plus a novel based on the life of Mona Lisa, finally achieving her quest to become the author of books and her own life. In Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, noted writer Jennifer Horne draws on years of research and an intimate understanding of the vast archive Sara Mayfield left behind to sensitively render Mayfield’s struggle to move through the world as the person she was—and her ultimate success in surviving to define the terms of her story.
 

The poems in The Off-Season are populated with things—'90s TV shows, mixtapes, crosstown buses, winter beaches—signifiers that trace a trajectory from girlhood to adulthood and bring to the surface feelings and desires that ordinarily stay hidden. We witness the strangeness of modern life, relive our own adolescent awkwardness and listen in on conversations with dead poets, TV characters, family members and intimates. With humor, fierceness and generosity, The Off-Season grapples with the question of how to be in the world.

On the Desire to Levitate is the first collection of poems by Alison Powell. This striking collection includes vivid, unflinching meditations on aging, mythology, poetry, and family. In tight, elegant lines that alternate between homage and elegy, these poems explore known subjects with a rebellious eye: a defeated Hercules and a bitter Eurydice, a sympathetic Lucifer, and generations of adolescent girls as mythical adventurers moving within a beloved but confining Midwest. Yet in Powell’s skillful hands, hardship never overtakes: as judge Charles Hood writes, “There’s often a delicious humor in this work, and always a deep and lasting integrity.”

Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919) was a gifted writer, poet, naturalist, and artist with a keen perspective on Appalachian life and culture. She and her husband Frank lived on Walden’s Ridge in southeast Tennessee, where they struggled to raise a family in the difficult mountain environment. Between 1908 and 1918, Miles kept a series of journals in which she recorded in beautiful and haunting prose the natural wonders and local customs of Walden’s Ridge. Jobs were scarce, however, and as the family’s financial situation deteriorated, Miles began to sell literary works and paintings to make ends meet. Her short stories appeared in national magazines such as Harper’s Monthly and Lippincott’s, and in 1905 she published Spirit of the Mountains, a nonfiction book about southern Appalachia. After the death of her three-year-old son from scarlet fever in 1913, the journals took a more somber turn as Miles documented the difficulties of mountain life, the plight of women in rural communities, the effect of disparities of class and wealth, and her own struggle with tuberculosis.

Previously examined only by a handful of scholars, the journals contain both poignant and incisive accounts of nature and a woman’s perspective on love and marriage, death customs, child raising, medical care, and subsistence on the land in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century. With a foreword by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, this edited selection of Emma Bell Miles’s journals is illustrated with examples of her painting.

Does history live inside of us? Are we capable of transcending the past or are we destined to repeat it? With understated humor and grace, Once, This Forest Belonged to a Storm wrestles with questions of inheritance, spiritual unrest, the integrity of the self, and humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Excavating both personal and historical trauma and the rippling effects of the Holocaust, Austen Leah Rose writes of “the silence that follows after silence.” The poems in this debut collection map a surreal journey from alienation to belonging, as our speaker floats across the night sky over Los Angeles, communes with Shakespeare in a hotel room, attends a dinner party in outer space, and drifts down a river for fourteen years with her sister.

Many farsighted women writers in nineteenth-century America made thoughtful and sustained use of newspapers and magazines to effect social and political change. “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837-1916 examines these pioneering efforts and demonstrates that American women had a vital presence in the political and intellectual communities of their day.

Women writers and editors of diverse social backgrounds and ethnicities realized very early that the periodical was a powerful tool for education and social reform—it was the only efficient instrument to make themselves and their ideas better known. This collection of critical essays explores American women's engagement with the periodical press and shows their threefold use of the periodical: for social and political advocacy; for the critique of gender roles and social expectations; and for refashioning the periodical as a more inclusive genre that both articulated and obscured such distinctions as class, race, and gender.

Including essays on familiar figures such as Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Only Efficient Instrument” also focuses on writings from lesser-known authors, including Native American Zitkala-Sä, Mexican American María Cristina Mena, African American Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and the Lowell factory workers. Covering nearly eighty years of publishing history, from the press censure of the outspoken Angelina Grimké in 1837 to the last issue of Gilman's Forerunner in 1916, this fascinating collection breaks new ground in the study of the women's rights movement in America.

When critics of poet Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a collection of poetry, dismiss her work as derivative, they fail to see her writing as part of a new creative pantheon, sitting alongside other works that, like the popular copybooks in antebellum America, are structured as a conversation between artistic allies. Different kinds of copying in this period were distinctly feminized practices, such as artistic copying, pedagogical recitation, and literary imitation. Ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of visual art, reveals a particularly interesting form of copying, as the artwork in question becomes a kind of mediated space between author and reader; this practice, then, becomes the emblematic form of literature as collective production.

Original Copy frames ekphrasis and other forms of literary and visual copy-work as key concepts for understanding the discussions of nationalism, originality, and gender that dominated US literary circles during the first half of the nineteenth century. Christa Holm Vogelius focuses on four major writers of the period—Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Hawthorne, and Henry Longfellow—to offer a narrative of a self-consciously feminine antebellum literary culture that was equally invested in literary nationality and convention. The explicitly feminized forms of the copy between and within media, she argues, became a productive means by which writers across a variety of genres interrogated the ill-defined but ubiquitous idea of an “original” American literature. Original Copy bridges three bodies of scholarship that have remained largely distinct—studies of literary nationalism and transnationalism, scholarship on gender in nineteenth century literary culture, and aesthetic and media theory—to argue for the significance of both imitation and intimate author-reader relations to the development of an American literature. 

In 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft drew upon her experiences as a governess as well as her understanding of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to publish this popular collection of moral tales for children. Not surprisingly, the woman who would later write A Vindication of the Rights of Women had strong views on children's education. Wollstonecraft desired nothing less than liberating children, both girls and boys, from what she believed were irrational modes of education in late eighteenth-century European culture. Her hyper rational stories became influential models for expressing particular philosophies of education through children's literature.

This beautiful facsimile of the 1791 edition includes the original illustrations by William Blake. A commentary by Eileen Hunt Botting puts the text in context and hints at influences on Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary Shelley and the pedagogical philosophy behind Shelley's novel Frankenstein.
 
Like all volumes in the Women in Print series, Original Stories from Real Life is provided as an open access book and downloads to a wide variety of platforms and online e-readers.
 

Othea’s Letter to Hector, one of Christine de Pizan’s most popular works, is at the same time one of her most complex creations. Combining a somewhat Sibylline verse text based on a mythological figure with extensive citation of pagan sapiential authorities, the Bible, and the Church Fathers, it showcases Christine’s extraordinary learning and her innovative approach to didacticism. An appendix provides new insights on her skillful use of patristic sources and creative command of Latin authors.

Our Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire— the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them. Throughout the collection, McGlennen weaves the natural elements of Minnesota with rich historical commentary and current images of urban Native life. Reverence for wildlife and foliage is pierced by the sharp man-made skylines of Minneapolis while McGlennen reckons with the heavy impact of industrial progress on the souls and everyday lives of individuals.

While working with both traditional and contemporary form, McGlennen’s unique use of space and rhythm creates poetry that is both captivating and accessible. Our Bearings does not attempt to speak for a population; rather it offers vibrant stories and moments that give voice to pieces of a large and complex tapestry of experiences. Through keen observation and a deep understanding of Native life in Minneapolis, McGlennen has created a timely collection that contributes beautifully to the important conversation about contemporary urban Native life in North America and globally.
 

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.

In the field of Victorian studies, few scholars have looked beyond the customary identification of the Christian Madonna with the Victorian feminine ideal—the domestic Madonna or the Angel in the House. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams shows, however, that these three Victorian writers made extensive use of the Madonna in feminist arguments. They were able to see this figure in new ways, freely appropriating the images of independent, powerful, and wise Virgin Mothers.

In addition to contributions in the fields of literary criticism, art history, and religious studies, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism places a needed emphasis on the connections between the intellectuals and the activists of the nineteenth-century women's movement. It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments, that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.

The first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich’s full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships
 

Adrienne Rich is best known as a feminist poet and activist. This iconic status owes especially to her work during the 1970s, while the distinctive political and social visions she achieved during the second half of her career remain inadequately understood. In Outward, poet, scholar, and novelist Ed Pavlić considers Rich’s entire oeuvre to argue that her most profound contribution in poems is her emphasis on not only what goes on “within us” but also what goes on “between us.” Guided by this insight, Pavlić shows how Rich’s most radical work depicts our lives—from the public to the intimate—in shared space rather than in owned privacy.

Informed by Pavlić’s friendship and correspondence with Rich, Outward explores how her poems position visionary possibilities to contend with cruelty and violence in our world. Employing an innovative framework, Pavlić examines five kinds of solitude reflected in Rich’s poems: relational solitude, social solitude, fugitive solitude, dissident solitude, and radical solitude. He traces the importance of relationships to her early writing before turning to Rich’s explicitly antiracist and anticapitalist work in the 1980s, which culminates with her most extensive sequence, “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” Pavlić concludes by examining the poet’s twenty-first century work and its depiction of relationships that defy historical divisions based on region, race, class, gender, and sexuality.

A deftly written engagement in which one poet works within the poems of another, Outward reveals the development of a major feminist thinker in successive phases as Rich furthers her intimate and erotic, social and political reach. Pavlić illuminates Rich’s belief that social divisions and the power of capital inform but must never fully script our identities or our relationships to each other. 
 

In The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, Gillian Cummings gives voice to her version of Ophelia, a young woman shattered by unbearable losses, and questions what makes a mind unwind till the outcome is deemed a suicide. Ophelia’s story, spoken quietly, lyrically, in prose poems whose tone is unapologetically feminine, is bracketed by short, whittled-down once-sonnets featuring other Ophelias, nameless “she” and “you” characters who address the question of madness and its aftermath. These women and girls want to know, what is God when the soul is at its nadir of suffering, and how can one have faith when living with a mind that wants to destroy itself?

If it is true, as Joseph Campbell said, that “the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight,” then Cummings strains the boundaries of this notion: “Is it the same? The desire to end a life / and the need to know how: a flower’s simple bliss?” Her women and girls, part “little heavenling” and part “small hellborn,” understand the emptiness of utmost despair and long for that other emptiness, which can be thought of as union with God, the death of the troublesome ego. Cummings’s poetic ancestors may be Dickinson and Plath and her source here Shakespeare, but more contemporary voices also echo in her poems, those of Lucie Brock-Broido, Larissa Szporluk, and Cynthia Cruz. Here, in The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, is what might happen if, after sealing off the doors and turning on the gas, indeed, after dying, a poet had come to embrace the holiness in how “all dissolves: one color, / one moon, all earth, red as love, red as living.”

In her final poetry collection, Linda Sillitoe transformed
ordinary events into thoughtful, funny, and
sharp commentaries on the human condition. A
mother painstakingly alters a dress for a beloved
daughter, and the “cloth and needle weave her daughter’s
dreams.” Later a daughter mourning her father’s
death remembers how “something vital vanished.”
From warning a friend against growing “spoiled
just a bit for ordinary men” to trying to “fit this
time among our dearest and darkest demons” when
moving back to Utah, Sillitoe reveals a world “where
poems hold such power,” and each stanza carries
multiple meanings.
Despite, or perhaps in conjunction with, life’s joy
and sorrow, Sillitoe’s verses reveal an unconventional
spirit determined to transcribe life’s experiences
in a manner that is both accessible and extraordinary,
ending with a promise to continue “scribbling
warranties in the sand. / Over time, we lose what we
own / and learn the motions that bring it back— /
like this moon, as caught, as wild, as we.”