SOURCE: Toth, Susan Allen. “‘The Rarest and Most Peculiar Grape’: Versions of the New England Woman in Nineteenth-Century Local Color Literature.” In Regionalism and the Female Imagination: A Collection of Essays, edited by Emily Toth, pp. 15-28. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Toth considers New England regional fiction by female authors in terms of the changing status of women in late-nineteenth century America.

Watching the lucidly neurotic heroine of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying agonize toward an independence she needs but fears and listening uncomfortably to Jong's frank criticism of men and marriage, many contemporary critics have hailed Isadora Wing as a startlingly new development among American literary characters. But the so-called “new woman” who is trying to define her personal and social position apart from man's does not simply emerge full-blown in Jong's pages. This new woman has been struggling in print for...