E.D.E.N. Southworth's Hidden Hand

E.D.E.N. Southworth (Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte) was one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific and successful authors, with more novels to her credit than Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain combined. She was widely beloved by readers for her feisty heroines who rode horses, shot pistols or bows and arrows, captured notorious villains, became sea captains, and had other such grand adventures. Readers named their daughters, their boats, and their racehorses Capitola after their new favorite character in Emma’s bestselling 1859 novel The Hidden Hand, which sold 10,000 copies in the first print run.

In her fifty novels, Southworth wrote about unspeakable topics for the time: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty, capital punishment, and other social issues—many of which readers still grapple with today—all nicely tucked away within the pages of her “domestic fiction.” Despite being raised in a slave-owning family, her first works appeared in The National Era, a known abolitionist magazine. She supported emancipation and encouraged her longtime friend Harriet Beecher Stowe to publish Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In a bold and daring life that spanned almost the entirety of the century, Emma advocated for better education for girls and better living conditions for the poor, nursed Union soldiers during the Civil War, and joined the early women’s rights movement.

Emma helped encourage generations of women readers to question and challenge the status quo. Yet although she achieved international fame in her lifetime, knowledge of Southworth and her novels virtually disappeared in the 1940s as readers were drawn to the new Modernism literary movement. For Emma, it was also partly because she had done so well at hiding her progressive ideas in the biographical pieces written during her life. This hidden-in-plain-sight approach worked for a single mother who needed to make money by her pen—her main means of providing for herself and her children after her husband abandoned them—but it helped incorrectly categorize Southworth well into the twentieth century as being against many of the causes she in fact supported in her novels.

By meticulously combining details from Southworth’s novels, partial biographies, newspapers, and hundreds of personal letters, Rose Neal has written the first-ever biography of E.D.E.N. and pieced together the fascinating life of a woman who was as determined as any of the heroines she created.

Readers of this lively, accessible biography will be as fascinated at following the twists and turns of a rags-to-riches story as E.D.E.N. Southworth's original readers who avidly consumed her sensational serials in the nineteenth century. So lightly does Rose Neal wear her learning that only on second thought will the reader appreciate the immense amount of archival research underpinning this scintillating portrait of an author driven by a mission to entertain, inspire, and emancipate women and girls. This first full-length biography of America's most popular and yet underrated novelist deftly demonstrates how Southworth transformed her own life experience into scandalous fiction engaging with the most tendentious social issues of the day. A lifetime achievement, E.D.E.N. Southworth's Hidden Hand will remain the standard work for years to come.

After more than twelve years of researching American author E.D.E.N. Southworth, Rose Neal, PhD, is one of the preeminent scholars on the author’s work and life. In 2012, she finished her master’s thesis on Southworth before embarking on a doctorate in literature from Swansea University in Wales, where she successfully defended her dissertation on Southworth’s impact on female education. Dr. Neal has also presented numerous academic papers about the author at professional conferences and libraries. While researching and writing about Southworth’s fifty-plus novels, Dr. Neal also discovered that the novelist lived a fascinating life that spanned most of the nineteenth century—a story that Dr. Neal believed needed to be told. After a twenty-plus-year career in teaching, both at the high school and university levels, Dr. Neal retired and is now devoting herself full-time to a second career as a writer. In addition to her love of research and storytelling, she enjoys traveling with her husband, Chris, and spending time in her garden. She lives in Edmond, Oklahoma.

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