Rose Neal Author
About the Book
E.D.E.N. Southworth (Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte) was one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific and successful authors, with more novels to her credit than Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain combined. Readers loved her feisty heroines who rode horses, shot pistols, captured notorious villains, became sea captains, and had other such grand adventures. In 1859, countless readers named their daughters Capitola after their favorite character in Southworth’s best-selling The Hidden Hand.
In her fifty-plus novels, Southworth wrote about unspeakable topics for the time, including alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty, and capital punishment—all nicely tucked away within the pages of her “domestic fiction.” Despite being raised in a slave-owning family, she wrote for The National Era (a known abolitionist magazine), supported emancipation, and encouraged her longtime friend Harriet Beecher Stowe to publish Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Southworth also advocated for better education for girls and better living conditions for the poor and joined the early women’s rights movement.
Although Southworth achieved international fame in her lifetime, knowledge of her work virtually disappeared as readers were drawn to the new Modernist literature. Because Southworth never discussed her progressive views publicly—a necessity as a single mother who made a living by her pen—she has long been incorrectly categorized as being against causes she in fact supported. Now, by combining details from Southworth’s novels, newspapers, and personal letters, Rose Neal has set the record straight, piecing together the fascinating life of a woman who was as determined as the heroines she created.
Reviews
Readers of this lively, accessible biography will be as fascinated at following the twists and turns of a rags-to-riches story as E.D.E.N. Southworth’s original readers who avidly consumed her sensational serials in the nineteenth century. So lightly does Rose Neal wear her learning that only on second thought will the reader appreciate the immense amount of archival research underpinning this scintillating portrait of an author driven by a mission to entertain, inspire, and emancipate women and girls. This first full-length biography of America’s most popular and yet underrated novelist deftly demonstrates how Southworth transformed her own life experience into scandalous fiction engaging with the most tendentious social issues of the day. A lifetime achievement, E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand will remain the standard work for years to come.
-- Caroline Franklin, author of The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and Byronism
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E.D.E.N. Southworth’s ‘tomboys’ and self-reliant heroines inspired countless nineteenth-century readers to reimagine what women could be and do in this world. Neal’s crisp detail and exacting research brings her subject out of the shadows and into sharp focus—and bears witness to the conviction that forgotten women writers still matter.
-- Amy Helmes and Kim Askew, Lost Ladies of Lit podcast
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"An important step in renewing attention to a grievously neglected author who wrote daring heroines with 'sway and swagger.' Neal draws on fresh archival research to document the multifaceted life of the bestseller whose boundary-pushing novels broadened the model of what a nineteenth-century woman could be."
—Rebecca Romney, rare books dealer; author of Jane Austen’s Bookshelf
