Allison Nick, University of Mississippi
Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2023), 93-113

Martha Gellhorn’s career as a foreign correspondent was defined by a commitment to reporting the effects of total war on everyday people. This article traces the feminist and political ramifications of Gellhorn’s human interest perspective in her fictional writing, particularly her novel about Czechoslovakia, A Stricken Field (1940), and her short story about Corsica, “Luigi’s House” (1941). Gellhorn’s mid-century modernist writing unites a tradition of aesthetic experimentation with concerns about the state of democracy, the positioning of nationality, and the resulting crises of human rights and citizenship. Within the specific historical context of the mid- century period when the divide between home front and warfront ceased to exist and the connection between home and nation was ruptured, Gellhorn raises the private space of the home to the level of public, political importance where the most basic human rights are defended and safeguarded. By reading A Stricken Field and “Luigi’s House” through the combined lens of refugee studies and feminist approaches to domesticity, this article investigates how Gellhorn reconfigures the home as a radical site of resistance, examines the role of women in community and national belonging, and critiques democratic nations like the United States and Britain for their own histories of isolationism and occupation.

Sharon Halevi, University of Haifa
Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2023), 67-92

Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps’s first adolescent girls’ novel Caroline Westerley: or, the Young Traveller from Ohio (1833) is a travelogue of the Great Lakes and the Hudson River valley. Given Phelps’s educational and scientific work, it has been viewed as another effort to disseminate scientific knowledge. This article argues first that Phelps situated her novel within the context of a highly popular girls’ tour, which held considerable personal and ideological meaning. Second, it maintains that Phelps used the novel to reflect upon models of femininity, arguing in favor of one in which the life of the mind, including a lifelong interest in science and religion, occupied a central place, and against one focused on consumerism and the body. The article closes with a reflection on the ways in which Phelps’s ideas regarding opposing models of femininity fit with Joan Brumberg’s argument regarding the rise of consumerism and its effect on girls’ bodies at the turn of the century. The article is based on a reading of Phelps’s fictional text alongside her nonfictional text Lectures to Young Ladies (1833).

Kelly Fleming, Kenyon College
Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2023), 35-65

This essay examines Lady Delacour’s electioneering in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Situating Lady Delacour’s political participation in the history of the eighteenth-century electoral system and the settler politics of the Edgeworth family, it suggests that Edgeworth’s first English tale offers a model for women’s limited political participation in response to women’s radical and revolutionary action at the end of the eighteenth century. The essay uses electoral material culture—the cockades and ribbons Lady Delacour wears, distributes, and draws—to spotlight how Edgeworth encouraged landowning women to perform, from a secondary and subordinate position, the electoral work that served the gender and class hierarchies underpinning the political systems across the United Kingdom.

Fauve Vandenberghe, Ghent University
Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2023), 11-34

This article examines the early suffragist and suffragette revival of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762). Studying Montagu’s representation in prominent suffrage journals and the writing of leading women’s rights activists, this essay argues that she was celebrated as both a remarkably progressive New Woman-prototype and as an early example for women’s militant tactics. In doing so, this paper sheds new light on the complex recovery history of Montagu. It also contributes to our understanding of the importance of feminist literary criticism and women’s literary history in the historiographic projects of the early women’s movement.