¹ Sicherman's approach and her findings are congruent with those of other cultural historians and literary critics who have explored American women's reading and writing practices from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. These scholars have suggested that reading has had an enduring value and a political function in a male-dominated society that has placed constraints on women's pursuit of educational and professional opportunities. See Davidson, Cathy N., Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Kelley, Mary, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: 2006)Google Scholar; Radway, Janice, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984)Google Scholar; Long, Elizabeth, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar; Sweeney, Megan, “Reading Is My Window”: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's Prisons (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² Wimsatt, William K. and Beardsley, M. C., “The Affective Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 57 (1949), 31–5.Google Scholar See also Wimsatt, and Beardsley, , “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 (1946), 468–88Google Scholar. de Certeau, Michel, The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Randall, Steven (Berkeley, CA, 1984)Google Scholar.

³ Jauss, Hans Robert, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in Cohen, Ralph, ed., New Directions in Literary History (Baltimore, 1974), 37Google Scholar; Jauss, , Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Shaw, Michael (Minneapolis, 1982)Google Scholar; Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978)Google Scholar; Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA, 1980)Google Scholar; Tompkins, Jane P., ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism (Baltimore, 1980)Google Scholar, x. Over the last decade, James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein have published excellent collections of essays charting advances in reader-response and reception studies. See Machor, James L. and Goldstein, Philip, eds., Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Goldstein, Philip and Machor, James L., eds., New Directions in American Reception Study (New York; Oxford University Press, 2008).Google Scholar See also Machor, James L., ed., Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (Baltimore, 1993)Google Scholar; Machor, , Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820–1865 (Baltimore, 2011), esp. 3–35Google Scholar.

⁴ Hall, David D. and Hench, John B., eds., Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book: America, 1639–1876 (Worcester, MA, 1987)Google Scholar; Robert Darnton, “First Steps toward A History of Reading,” reprinted in Machor and Goldstein, Reception Study, 160–79. Darnton's essay was originally published in Daedalus (Summer 1982), 65–83. Hall, David D., Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, MA, 1996), esp. 36–78Google Scholar; Brown, Matthew P., The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Darnton, Robert, “What Is the History of Books?”, in Darnton, The Case for Books (Philadelphia, PA: Public Affairs, 2009), 175–206Google Scholar; Chartier, Roger, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Stanford, CA, 1994).Google Scholar

⁵ This is a partial survey of the findings in A History of the Book in America. Because I am principally concerned with contextualizing the reading and writing practices of Sicherman's subjects, I have concentrated on the first three volumes, which begin with the early seventeenth century and conclude in the 1880s. See Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (2000); Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society, 1790–1840 (2010); Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (2007). Carl F. Kaestle and Janice Radway, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940; and David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson, The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Post-war America take the story from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Except for the first edition of The Colonial Book, all of the volumes have been published by the University of North Carolina Press. For an exemplary survey of the recent scholarship on reading and writing practices, see Price, Leah, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004), 303–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Adams, Hannah, A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams, Written by Herself with Additional Notices, by a Friend (Boston, 1832), 7Google Scholar. Recent scholarship on the relationship between gender and reading includes Flynn, Elizabeth A. and Schweickart, Patrocinio P., eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore, 1986)Google Scholar; Nichols, Elisabeth B., “‘Blunted Hearts’: Female Readers and Printed Authority in the Early Republic,” in Ryan, Barbara and Thomas, Amy M., eds., Reading Acts: US Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950 (Knoxville, TN, 2002), 1–28Google Scholar; Mary Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America,” in ibid., 53 –78; Jane Greer, “‘Ornaments, Tools, or Friends’: Literary Reading at the Bryn Mawr School for Women Workers, 1921–1938,” in ibid., 179–98; Hackel, Heidi Brayman and Kelly, Catherine E., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).Google Scholar

⁷ Fuller, Margaret, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) reprinted in The Viking Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Kelley, Mary (New York, 1994), 6Google Scholar.

⁸ On Ellen Butler and Sarah Mapps Douglass see Gross and Kelley, An Extensive Republic, 467–70, 483–94.

⁹ For Goulemot, see Price, Leah, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004), 311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.