Female American writers

Born in Manchester, England, Burnett moved to rural Tennessee at age sixteen with her financially bankrupt family. To support herself, she began writing for American magazines. Though she began writing novels for adults, she gained lasting success writing for children. She is best known for Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Secret Garden, and A Little Princess.

The Secret Garden. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1911.

Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1870, she married Oscar Chopin and moved to Louisiana, living in both New Orleans and Natchitoches. She began to write after her husband died of swamp fever in 1883, and she was forced to support herself and her children. Bayou Folk (1894), a collection of stories about life in Louisiana, gave her national recognition. Her popularity soon ended with the publication of her controversial, but now critically aclaimed novel, The Awakening (1898), which deals with female independence through a suicidal female heroine who leaves her husband and children in an attempt to discover her personal freedom.

Bayou Folk. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894. First editon.

With encouragement from her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth wrote a string of books aimed at children as well as novels for adults. She lived a majority of her life in Ireland, and her novels focus on Irish common life. These the include Castle Rackrent (1800), Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817), which influenced Sir Walter Scott’s treatment of Irish regional subject matter. In her writings, she deals with sexual equality and often features a woman as the central character.

Frank a Sequel to Frank in Early Lessons. London: Printed for R. Hunter, and Baldwin Cradock and Joy, 1822. 3 vols. First edition.

Moral Tales for Young People. London, New York: George Routledge and Sons, 188-? New edition with eight illustrations.

Her Elsie character "attained more widespread interest and affection" than any other character in juvenile fiction of the time with the exception of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Because her family was against the idea of advertising her name, she used the pseudonym, Martha Farquharson. The idea for her Elsie character came to her while bedridden with a back ailment and dependent upon her stepbrother. The twenty-eight volumes of her Elsie series "follow in the tradition of the stories of pietistic children born with an instinct for good and evil as delimited by the Puritan code, children who not only fight off temptations but also enlighten and urge to salvation their elders, thereby appeasing an angry God, eluding Satan, and earning their rewards in heaven when they die holy and dramatic deaths sometime between the ages of two and twelve. . . . Elsie actually did pass briefly beyond the boundaries of the living in the second volume of the series, but miraculously she rose again to live a long life" (Smedman).