SOURCE: "Women Artists as Exiles in the Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson," Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1986, pp. 3-15.

In the essay that follows, Weimer studies Woolson 's reflections on the extent to which "women artists … are ultimately exiled from their own art."

American women starting to write just after the Civil War found themselves standing on uneven new ground. Not because it was an act of daring for women to present themselves as professional writers: women novelists of the previous generation had broken that ground, and some, like Susan Warner and Maria Cummins, had written best sellers. These "literary domestics," however, had atoned for their presumption in departing from women's sphere; they made domesticity their subject matter, and justified their work by its moral uplift (Kelley 335, 329).

But among this new generation of women, many writers, like Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah...