Two years before Nina Baym published Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (1978), which set the agenda for the recovery of nineteenth-century women's fiction, she published The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (1976). More than three decades into the revival of nineteenth-century American women's fiction, however, literary historians rarely engage works by women across the range of their careers, as they do the works of their canonical male contemporaries, especially Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Instead, women who produced fiction for decades have entered literary history primarily through single novels, for example Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) for Harriet Beecher Stowe. Furthermore, such singular works are read primarily in relation to genres (such as Baym's “woman's fiction,” the “domestic novel,” or the “sentimental novel”) and sociopolitical contexts (such as the debates over slavery, Indian removal, and women's rights), rather than in relation to their authors’ bodies of work. In addition, scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on antebellum women's novels, at the expense of short fiction. Literary historians have been more willing to concede that women who produced fiction mostly after the Civil War had true careers and that their works might be most productively considered in the context of an author's entire oeuvre, in part because more women, such as Edith Wharton, began self-consciously fashioning themselves as “serious” artists.