During the spring of 1874, when Susan B. Anthony read aloud to her ailing mother, the book she chose was Lillie Devereux Blake's new novel, Fettered for Life. "It will stimulate every girl reader to have something beside marriage to depend on for support," Anthony recorded in her daybook for Sunday, 5 April. Blake's novel was unabashedly political, depicting, through a cross-section of social levels, the consequences of female subordination in the home and in the workplace, thus addressing some of the most pressing social questions of the late nineteenth century.

Blake, who lived from 1833 to 1913, was a fiction writer, journalist, essayist, and lecturer, a cultural critic who commented on a wide range of social conventions, especially those regarding women. Her prose is of particular interest because it spans both the Civil War and the suffrage movement and moves between sentimental, realistic, and naturalistic forms. She was a gifted writer...