customs, and the problems and passions of women as well as of men.
Although the Times critic would view the concerns of women novelists as
aberrations from what "literature" should concern itself with, it is, in fact,
the male American writers--the canonical writers--who are the aberra-
tion. The majority of the canonical male writers have been concerned pri-
marily with the solitary male quest, the individual writ large. Yet, as Nina
Baym pointed out in her pioneering study, Woman's Fiction ( 1978), it is not
"purely" literary criteria that would identify a whaling ship as a better
"symbol of the human community" than a sewing circle. ²

In the mid- 1980 I developed a course at Queens College in nineteenth-
century American women writers, which I called "The (Other) American
Tradition." ³ Since few texts were available at the time, I relied on photo-
copies of much of the material. The course was exciting and stimulating
for me as well as for the students, and the success of this course confirmed
my belief that these works can stand on their own. It also became apparent
to me that the name of a work on a college syllabus helps to legitimize the
work, and underscored what I already knew: if these works are to gain
legitimacy, they must become a regular part of the curriculum. However,
they need to be studied for themselves, not introduced tentatively as token
women writers on a traditional male syllabus. After my successful experi-
ence in teaching this course for several semesters, I organized a panel on
nineteenth-century American women writers at the Modern Language
Association conference in Washington, D.C., in 1989. The response to the
panel was overwhelming; it was clear that the work by these women
writers was as interesting to scholars as it was to students.

Since the appearance of the first anthologies of nineteenth-century
American women writers in 1985-- Hidden Hands, edited by Lucy Freibert
and Barbara A. White, and Provisions, edited by Judith Fetterley--scores
of these writers have come into print. Some of the first twentieth-century
reprints of these women's works include Elizabeth Stoddard, The Morge-
sons, edited by Lawrence Buell and Sandra Zagarell ( 1984); Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
, The Story of Avis, edited by Carol Farley Kessler ( 1985); and
Susan Warner The Wide, Wide World, edited by Jane Tompkins ( 1987).
Rutgers began publishing the American Women Writers series in 1986,
and the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
appeared in 1988. With the work of so many nineteenth-century American
women writers now in print, it is no longer difficult to teach their work in
the classroom. There is need, then, for a book like this one, which will
help those who teach and read these writers to understand some of the
larger patterns underlying their work.

In the title of this book, I have put the word other in parentheses for
several important and very specific reasons. First of all, I wish to point out

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