Kindred hands : letters on writing by British and American women authors, 1865-1935 /

This fine collection illustrates various 19th-century women writers' interest in the craft of authorship. Each of the 13 essays introduces an author (e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps) and offers illustrative letters, in almost exact transcriptions, each wrote to notable literary figures and friends (Mary Ann Evans [George Eliot], James T. Fields, and Charles Scribner, to name just of few of their correspondents). Transatlantic literary culture both separated and united them, but all understood the power of words to engage the reader. Cognard-Black (St. Mary's College) and MacLeod (Nebraska Wesleyan Univ.) include writers of color, for example Harlem Renaissance writer/editor Jessie Redmon Fauset and abolitionist/reformer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Fauset's four letters to Langston Hughes bring her complexity to life. Supplementing Letter Writing as a Social Practice, ed. by David Barton and Nigel Hall (2000), and "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers" series, ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr., this volume is well researched and written with great clarity. Each chapter includes extensive notes and works cited, and the index to the volume is thorough. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. S. A. Parker emerita, Hiram College