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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.
