Fictional Females: Mirrors and Models

The Changing Image of Women in American Novels from 1789 to 1939

Fictional Females is a book about books--specifically, about more than 160 American novels that had female protagonists, appeared between the immediate post-Revolutionary period and the beginning of World War II, and shaped as well as reflected womens lives. All 80 authors, both men and women, were bestsellers and/or critically acclaimed in their time, and their fiction provides a record of how successive generations of women accepted or challenged the conventions of their day and enjoyed the rewards or suffered the consequences of either choice. Today, an examination of those novels and the historical context in which they appeared illuminates the changing conscious and unconscious assumptions about the nature of woman--of what she is, what she wants, and what she gets--over the years.