American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869

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
Review of the hardback: 'Although a self-styled act of 'literary recovery,'Melissa Homestead's American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 seems to me actually nothing less than a revisionary literary history of the heyday of women's writing - and the conditions underlying and regulating its composition and circulation - in the United States. Based on a perspective reading of nineteenth-century copyright as a central agency in the formation of the field of letters, it adroitly explains how the terms and structures of copyright, especially in a society fast moving toward the commercialization of its culture, not only regulated the circulation of texts but defined the parameters of authorship - in particular, the possibilities available to the emergent category of women authors.' Ezra Greenspan, Kahn Chair in the Humanities, Southern Methodist University