continued…

In the fall semester of 2013, Dr. Kristen Pond, Assistant Professor of English at Baylor University, taught a class entitled “English 4370: ‘A Mob of Scribbling Women’: Women and the Novel 1740’s-1860’s.” The class title comes from a quotation from Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American novelist and short story writer responding to his publisher in 1855: “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.” He, along with others, found the figure of the woman writer troubling in the nineteenth century. Dr. Pond’s course was organized around the social, economic, and political factors that began to reshape women’s role in society.

Recognizing the contribution that the class could make toward refreshing and extending the current exhibit, Giving Nineteenth Century Women Writers A Voice and a Face, the class was invited to add their own research to the exhibit. The students, working as teams, selected a woman writer whose work is represented in the ABL’s collection, gathered interesting information about her, decided what to display and how to display it, prepared the labels for the exhibit, and wrote a blogpost about their woman writer. The blogs (soon to be posted) will focus on Caroline Sheridan Norton, Margaret Fuller, Mary Augusta Arnold Ward, Charlotte Endymion Porter, and Daisy Ashford.

The Armstrong Browning Library staff would like to thank the students for their interest in discovering the resources that the library has to offer and for their expertise in Giving Nineteenth Century Women Writers a Voice and a Face.