As a recent surge in transatlantic readings of Rowson’s work testifies, the facts of Rowsons’s biography make a transatlantic approach nearly inevitable. Born Susanna Haswell in England in 1762, she moved to the American colonies at the age of five and spent her childhood happily in Massachusetts until the Revolutionary War intervened. A prisoner exchange returned her Loyalist family to England in 1778. Fifteen years later, in 1793, a married Susanna Rowson embarked on her third Atlantic crossing with her husband, William, to join Thomas Wignell’s theater company in Philadelphia. As Jeffrey Richards aptly argues, Rowson’s theatrical career embodies the Anglo-American transatlanticism of the early American theater, making “Rowson . . . herself the space or hyphen between the two English-speaking cultures.”

Regular contributors of advice and commentary included Albert W. Atwood and Burton J. Hendrick. Atwood, who had written for the muckraking McClure’s Magazine (where Managing Editor Edith Lewis had worked), wrote a regular financial advice column. Hendrick, who left a position as a contributing editor at McClure’s in 1913 to become associate editor of The World’s Work, regularly contributed articles analyzing politics, world affairs, economics, and business. Of the editorial staff, Bruce Barton, the Editor in Chief, was the most visible contributor of signed commentary. His editorials were unsigned in 1915, but when he began signing them in 1916, their provocative titles and prominent placement made Barton the public face of the magazine. Fifty of these editorials, which combined Christian moralizing with patriotism, capitalist boosterism, and self-improvement advice, were published in book form in 1917 under the title More Power to You. As Barton proclaimed in his editorial commemorating the magazine’s first anniversary, it sought readers who “as Lincoln did, win their education through their reading. We stand with him—and them—for thrift, for a better national health, for more outdoor living, for better homes, clean amusement, for progress through self-help, for devotion to an ideal” (8 May 1916). He explicitly disavowed any connection to organized movements for reform, however, proclaiming in his editorial marking the magazine’s second anniversary that it sought to “help each reader to institute his own individual millennium in his own life, by making the most of himself” (30 April 1917).

At least one, and sometimes two, lavishly illustrated serial novels ran in each issue, as well as one or more short stories. Every Weekfiction leaned heavily towards popular genres, such as Westerns, mysteries, and romances. Most of the contributors were stalwarts of magazine fiction, now forgotten, such as Sewell Ford, Gertrude Brooke Hamilton, Grace Sartwell Mason, Holworthy Hall, Frederick Orin Bartlett, James Oliver Curwood, and Arthur Summers Roche. Ford had been a regular contributor to the Associated Sunday Magazines, and he continued as a regular contributor to Every Week, with his comic tales of the adventures of working-class New York hero “Torchy” appearing in nearly every issue for three years. Every Week also occasionally published fiction by writers whose names continue to appear in literary history, such as Susan Glaspell, Conrad Richter, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Zona Gale, and Christopher Morley. Perhaps the most significant literary work published in Every Week was Glaspell’s story “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917), adapted from her one act play Trifles (1916), about an Iowa farm wife suspected of murdering her husband and the two women who come to understand her motive for the crime while male legal authorities remain baffled.

In a strange sort of creative alchemy, her time in the Southwestern desert crystallized in her mind a way to approach the Nebraska prairies and the experiences of immigrant farm women as a subject for fiction. Thus the Arizona desert produced the novel Cather later characterized as her real "first novel," O Pioneers!, the story of Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson, who tames the prairies. The time she spent in the desert also fortified Cather's resolve to at least partially sever her ties to McClure's-she resigned as editor, although she continued to write for the magazine for three more years. As a result of her trip to the Southwest, she had, as she wrote in 1931, "recovered from the conventional editorial point of view" and was able to write about "a kind of country [she] loved" rather than working up "interesting material" alien to her.¹ As she wrote in 1928 in a copy of O Pioneers! she sent to a childhood friend in Red Cloud, "This was the first time I walked off on my own feet‒everything before was half read and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. In this one I hit the home pasture."

Private Woman presents the most fully developed analysis of American women's anonymous publication in the nineteenth century and the one bearing most directly on Sedgwick, but Kelley is not alone in reading women's anonymous and pseudonymous publication as symptoms of gendered anxiety. The idea that women in past centuries withheld their names because they experienced their own authorship as shameful or scandalous has achieved the character of received wisdom. Ask a typical lower-level undergraduate what she knows about women's authorship in the United States during the years of Sedgwick's greatest productivity (the 1820s through the 1840s), and she will tell you: "It wasn't considered respectable for women to write back then, so they didn't give their names, Or they took male pseudonyms.”⁴ I argue instead that Sedgwick's anonymity was a market strategy for constructing an authorial persona rather than an absence of an author or a denial of authorship, and her anonymity serves as a useful example through which we can reconsider the function of women's anonymous publication in the 1820s, '30s, and '40s.

A mere two years after Southworth’s death, Cather made her visit and Southworth's literary legacy the subject of a newspaper article for the State Journal of Lincoln, Nebraska, for which Cather had written reviews and cultural criticism as a student at the University of Nebraska and to which she occasionally contributed even after leaving Nebraska in 1895. Cather concisely frames Southworth as a popular writer of melodramatic novels, a southerner, and a celebrity, and enacts in miniature the dynamic Andreas Huyssen describes in "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other." At a moment in the evolution of American literature when the "great divide" was opening between mass culture and "authentic" culture, female reader and male author, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Cather sought to establish her own affiliation with the realm of pure and by positioning Southworth, her oeuvre, and her readers on the "wrong" side.

Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), appeared shortly after she began a leave of absence from editorial duties at McClure’s. Both critics and Cather herself dismissed her first novel as a pale imitation of Henry James, but her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), featuring an immigrant Swedish heroine in Nebraska, established her reputation as a novelist of the American West. Cather never returned to magazine editorial work, although a series of articles she wrote for McClure’s on opera singers led to The Song of the Lark (1915), a novel about a Swedish American girl from Colorado who achieves success as an opera singer in Europe and New York. Cather’s most autobiographical novel, My Ántonia (1918), presents its Bohemian immigrant heroine through the eyes of Jim Burden, an orphan from Virginia sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska. Cather valued the cosmopolitanism that nineteenth-century New Mexico, and Shadows on the Rock (1931), set in seventeenth-century Quebec—focus on moments of transition in European colonial projects in North America. She turned to her own family’s southern history in her last published novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Although she was attacked as conservative and backward-looking by leftist critics beginning in the 1930s, Cather has increasingly been recognized as an important modernist writer who experimented with literary form.

Alcott’s high rate of productivity and the extraordinary variety of literary forms in which she wrote, as well as the range of audiences she addressed, have challenged and intrigued scholars and leisure readers alike. Her first published story appeared in 1852 in the Olive Branch, a Boston story paper (an inexpensive weekly magazine published in newspaper format), and she continued to publish anonymous and pseudonymous tales in story papers intermittently throughout her career. These sensational melodramas featuring subversive heroines—”blood and thunder” tales, as Alcott called them—have kept twentieth-century scholars busy locating and reprinting them. Her first book, published in 1854 under her own name, was Flower Fables, a collection of fairy stories. She also published short fiction in elite venues such as the Atlantic Monthly magazine, plays, autobiographical Civil War sketches based on her wartime nursing experiences, and an adult novel, Moods (1864), all before Little Women, a novel that has become a worldwide icon of American girlhood. In Japan, Little Women was a perennial favorite for teaching good behavior, although occasionally young women admired Jo’s individualism and rebelliousness.

Born Wilella Cather in Back Creek, Virginia in 1873, Cather moved with her family to Webster County in south-central Nebraska in 1883. After a year living on a farm, the family moved to the county seat of Red Cloud, where Cather attended high school She then attended the University of Nebraska, in the state capital of Lincoln, majoring in English and working both on student publications and professionally as a journalist (primarily writing theater and book reviews). After her graduation in 1895, she spent a year doing journalistic writing and looking for work before moving to Pittsburgh in 1896 to take an editorial position at a regional women’s magazine. The magazine was short-lived, but Cather stayed on in Pittsburgh, returning to journalism and then turning to high school teaching to give herself more time to write fiction. She finally left Pittsburgh in 1906 to accept an editorial position at McClure’s Magazine in New York City, which became her primary residence until her death. She did not make her final break from McClure’s until 1912, becoming a full-time creative artist for the first time when she was nearly 40 years old. She died in New York City in 1947.