SOURCE: Ratner, Marc L. “The Iron Madonna: H. H. Boyesen's American Girl.” Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien 9 (1964): 166-72.

In the following essay, Ratner evaluates Boyesen's attitudes towards the nineteenth-century American woman as revealed in his fiction and criticism.

One of the great social questions of the late nineteenth century was the “woman question,” and the problems which developed out of the changing status of women in society, particularly that of the independent woman, provided material for novels and drama as well as for sociological treatises. One can see evidence of this interest in the work of Shaw, Ibsen, Henry James, to name a few in literature, Spencer and Nietzsche in philosophy. In American fiction, the development of the modern independent heroine was inextricably linked both with the general idea of realism and more specifically with the psychological novel. One thinks of Hester Prynne, Marcia Gaylord in Howells's A Modern Instance...