Through an exploration of women authors' engagements with copyright and married women's property laws, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869, revises nineteenth-century American literary history, making women's authorship and copyright law central. Using case studies of five popular fiction writers - Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune - Homestead shows how the convergence of copyright and coverture both fostered and constrained white women's agency as authors. Women authors exploited their status as nonproprietary subjects to advantage by adapting themselves to a copyright law that privileged readers'access to literature over authors' property rights. Homestead's inclusion of the Confederacy in this work sheds light on the centrality of copyright to nineteenth-century American nationalisms and on the strikingly different construction of author reader relations under U.S. and Confederate copyright laws.

Firs (1896) has long been central to literary critical debates about the nature and character of American literary regionalism. In the early 1990s, some New Historicist critics aligned the emergence of the literary movement with the rise of tourism as two means by which urban elites defi ned themselves as a socially and racially privileged class in the postwar nation. In an infl uential analysis of the mutually reinforcing development of the literary marketplace and class and cultural hierarchies, Richard Brodhead describes regionalism in Cultures of Letters (1993) as evidencing "an elite need for the primitive made available as a leisure outlet." 1 In giving "exercise to a sophisticate-vacationer's habits of mind," Brodhead writes, regional fi ction "rehearsed a habit of mental acquisitiveness strongly allied with genteel reading." 2 With a privileged urban vacationer as its narrator, Firs "builds the class logic of vacationing" into its very structure, Brodhead claims, pointing to the way that the unnamed narrator, who is also a publishing author, can arrive in the fi ctional community of Dunnet Landing, Maine, and "command someone else's home as a second home for her leisure. .. with a confi dent exercise of her rights." 3 Then, over the course of a summer, she turns the intimate life stories of the residents into her own "sympathetic possessions" that she abstracts and exports out of the place. 4 Feminist critics,

with whom Cather shared a home for nearly four decades, a relatively minor character in Cather's life, and yet occasionally, Lewis moves to the forefront. Describing Cather's "personal life" in the 1920s, Sergeant notes that when she visited their Five Bank Street apartment, Edith Lewis, who now worked at the J. Walter Thompson Company, was always at dinner. One realized how much her companionship meant to Willa. A captain, as Will White of Emporia said … must have a first officer, who does a lot the captain never knows about to steer the boat through rocks and reefs. (212) This portrait of Lewis as domestic engineer, unobtrusively steering the ship of the Bank Street apartment, has appealed to subsequent biographers, but they never cite the following sentence, which concludes Sergeant's brief portrait of Lewis: " 'It takes two to write a book' was another line of [White's] creed" (212). Sergeant does not explicitly apply White's maxim to Cather and Lewis, moving on instead to afternoon visits, when she found Cather alone (because Lewis was at the office), but she nevertheless implies that Lewis collaborated in the production of Cather's fiction. Rather than portray Lewis as collaborator, however, scholarship has long represented Cather as an autonomous and solitary author in the Romantic tradition, creating in isolation and in opposition to the modern social world. In The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism, Susan Rosowski claims that Cather privileges the power of the individual creative imagination to "wrest personal salvation from an increasingly alien world" (xi). Placing Cather in the tradition of British Romantic forebears such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, Rosowski argues that she followed them digitalcommons.unl.edu

, an anonymous reader for NEQ, and conference panel auhences at the American Studies Association and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing for comments on earlier versions of thls essay. The research and writing of this essay was supported by Peterson and Mellon Post-Dissertation Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society.

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