SOURCE: “‘Wimmen is My Theme, and also Josiah’: The Forgotten Humor of Marietta Holley,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Nos. 47-48, Summer-Fall, 1980, pp. 187-97.

In the following essay, Graulich urges renewed critical and popular attention to Holley's fiction, in particular her first novel, My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's.

According to a 1905 article in the Critic, Marietta Holley “entertained as large an audience … as has been entertained by the humor of Mark Twain.” Today few readers are familiar with Holley's work, though her narrator, the outspoken and strong-minded Samantha Allen, was “one of the most popular characters in American humor, male or female,” and the books which contained her opinions of “Wimmen's Rites” and a number of other social issues had an “enormous sale.” From 1873, when she published My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's, to 1914, when she wrote her last book, Samantha on the Woman Question, Holley used Samantha's common sense...