SOURCE: An introduction to Samantha Rastles the Woman Question, University of Illinois Press, 1983, pp. 1-20.

In the following essay, Curry discusses the feminist nature of Holley's novels.

A writer for The Critic of January, 1905, said of Marietta Holley: “As ‘Josiah Allen's Wife,' she has entertained as large an audience, I should say, as has been entertained by the humor of Mark Twain.” That puts Holley and her folksy, common-sense character Samantha Allen in illustrious company. Marietta Holley made a special contribution to nineteenth-century American humor—not because of innovative comic style or technique, for even in her own time the mother-wit, dialect style was anachronistic; nor because she was our only woman humorist, for the nineteenth century claimed Frances Whitcher, “Fanny Fern,” and others; but rather because she was the only humorist whose main character was a woman who spoke specifically about women's rights.

Much of Holley's...