The lyrical and political power of nineteenth-century women reformers' life writing

Paper Heroines studies the ways women represented their own and one another's lives in their personal diaries and their biographies of their contemporaries. Author Mollie Barnes urges us to read the life writing that emerged from among the relief-work networks of the South Carolina Lowcountry as deeply interconnected. By reading these women writers—Black and white, obscure and well-known—in conversation, Barnes presents entirely new portraits of these nineteenth-century freedom fighters. Like feminist and anti-racist leaders in our own moment, the women in Paper Heroines were often flawed. White women reformers sometimes created tensions, silences, revisions, and erasures within their print-culture networks, obscuring the lives and contributions of Black women. Black women developed counternarratives and counternetworks as they sought to reclaim their own life histories. What emerges from Barnes's exploration of these textual conversations is a story of complicated relationships that reveal the dynamism of women's lives in a place and time that was equally tumultuous and consequential.

Mollie Barnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society. She has published more than a dozen articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century women writers.

"With emphasis on race, genre, and geography, Paper Heroines stands to make a significant contribution to the study of Civil War and Reconstruction-era American women's writing. Moreover, Barnes's prose is beautiful, with turns of phrase that gave me immense pleasure as a reader."—Jennifer Putzi, William and Mary, author Fair Copy

"Barnes's multi-textual, cross-genre approach uncovers rich and fascinating stories that enable her to re-narrate the complex nature of Black and white women's relationships with each other and with the political upheavals of the era."—Desiree Henderson, Univeristy of Texas at Arlington, author of Short Diary Fiction

"Barnes sensitively illuminates dynamics between Black and white women abolitionists and reformers. She uses archival analysis and Lowcountry knowledge to argue persuasively for the literariness of their life-writing."—Barbara Mccaskill, University of Georgia, author of Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery

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Paper Heroines

Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838–1902

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