As a best-selling author of women's domestic fiction, Maria Jane McIntosh enjoyed great popularity. A native Southerner who spent most of her adulthood in the North, McIntosh was in a key position to comment on the major issues of her day. Like many domestic novelists, McIntosh scorned the women's rights movement; her heart always in the South, she believed that women should use their influence in the domestic sphere to better the condition of the nation as a whole. She took pride in her willingness to present balanced portraits of both the North and South in the chaotic years before the Civil War. McIntosh's major work of nonfiction, Woman in America: Her Work and Her Reward (1850), explicates the philosophy implicit in her novels; shorter works of nonfiction define her proslavery position. Although most were never published, she also wrote poems. Despite the renewal of interest in nineteenth-century American...