Four Stories By American Women: Life in the Iron Mills; The Yellow Wallpaper; The Country of the Pointed Firs; Souls Belated: Rebecca Harding Davis, ... OrneJewett, Edith Wharton (Penguin Classics)

New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 1992. Soft cover. Very Good. Clean, tight, unmarked; light age tanning; light wear to lower back corner near spine; otherwise spine straight and uncreased; appears unread; Rebecca Hardin Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills," ahead of its time by 50 years, realistically depicts the plight of factory workers in the mid-1800s and identifies "slavery" as a socially constructed category. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman points out how the psychiatric profession's misguided treatment of women paralleled the social mores that emphasized their passivity and dependency. Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Country of the Pointed Firs" catches the spirit of a small Maine seaport. Edith Wharton's elegant and deceptively simple "souls Belated," a portrait of a pair of American lovers traveling through Europe, is ultimately a story about all men and women: about the paradoxes of commitment and liberty, love and power, pity and cruelty. As these masterpieces of short fiction show, their authors, who flourished in the half century after the Civil War, blazed a trail for the recognition and acceptance of women as writers.