Voices carry: Authorship, community, and British and American women's advocacy fiction, 1848-1876

This dissertation examines the novels of four nineteenth-century women social reform writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and George Eliot. Through reading and writing advocacy novels, these writers initiated and participated in transatlantic conversations about social reform, justified their authorial voices, and struggled with the challenges of advocating and speaking for others across the social lines of class, race, and gender. To look at these British and American women authors together, I propose a model of "transatlantic reading" that challenges conventional ways of looking at nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary relations. I argue that, unlike their competitive, nationalistic male peers, these women forged transatlantic connections---connections that are visible in their textual echoes, their correspondence, and their shared use of reform discourse. The significant echoes in character, plot, narration, and language in these texts and in contemporaneous letters, essays, and journals reveal that these Anglo-American women writers were participating in a larger, contested dialogue about social reform and the rights of individuals and groups. Pairing Uncle Tom's Cabin with Mary Barton reveals how both Stowe and Gaskell use complex, engaging narrators to negotiate the dangerous terrain of women's public speech and to explore the contradictions of speaking for slaves and workers. Reading Gaskell's North and South alongside Phelps's The Silent Partner further explores the challenges of women's advocacy since both novels focus on reformer heroines who struggle to understand and improve the lives of factory workers. And, finally, I examine textual connections between Stowe's Dred and Eliot's Daniel Deronda in the context of the authors' warm friendship and correspondence, which reveals much about their struggles to speak publicly about racial prejudice. The transatlantic readings which make up this dissertation begin to sketch the largely undocumented historical context of Anglo-American women's reform fiction and suggest several theoretical and historical avenues for future intradisciplinary work.