«America is now wholly given over to a d - d mob of scribbling women and I should have no
chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash...» Taking Hawthorne's
famous 1855 complaint about women writers as a starting point for consideration Scribbling
Women and the Short Story Form is a collection of fourteen critical essays about the short
fiction of British and American women writers. This anthology takes a feminist approach
examining the liberating possibilities for women writers of the form of the short story a
genre often associated with alienation or subversion (the writer Frank O'Connor describes the
form as marginal or «outlaw»). Covering the work of selected women writers from the 1850s
through the late twentieth century this collection includes essays on well-known authors such
as Rebecca Harding Davis Louisa May Alcott Kate Chopin Katherine Anne Porter Flannery
O'Connor Cynthia Ozick and Ursula K. Le Guin alongside essays on Harriett Prescott Spofford
Ruth Stewart L. T. Meade Alice Dunbar-Nelson Zitkala-Sa Sui Sin Far and Lydia Davis
less-known authors whose stories offer rich ground for consideration.
