Fiction, Poetry, and Drama: Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930

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Kate Chopin on pot smoking. Pauline Hopkins on alchemy and the undead. Sui Sin Far on cross-dressing. Emma Lazarus and Angelina Weld Grimké on lesbian longing. Julia Ward Howe on intersexuality. Perhaps the first of its kind, Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women. In Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, selections span from early works like Sarah Louise Forten's anti-slavery poem 'The Grave of the Slave' (1831) and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1855), a novel about her struggle to break into the male-dominated field of journalism, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's revenge fantasy, 'When I Was a Witch' (1910) and Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem on the fraught nature of African American motherhood, 'Maternity' (1922). In between, readers will discover many vibrant and challenging lesser-known texts that are rarely collected today. Some, indeed, have been out of print for more than a century. Unique among anthologies of American literature, Radicals undoes such silences by collecting the underrepresented, the uncategorizable, the unbowed-powerful writings by American women of genius and audacity who looked toward, and wrote toward, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called 'a lifted world.' Contents List of Illustrations Foreword by Roxane Gay Introduction by Meredith Stabel and Zachary Turpin A Note on the Text Kate Chopin The Storm (1898) An Egyptian Cigarette (1900) Rebecca Harding Davis At Noon (1887) Emily Dickinson For each extatic instant (ca. 1859) Come slowly – Eden! (ca. 1860–61) He fumbles at your Soul (ca. 1862) He touched me, so I live to know (ca. 1862) Alice Dunbar-Nelson If I Had Known (1895) The Praline Woman (1899) I Sit and Sew (1918) Sui Sin Far A Chinese Ishmael (1899) A Chinese Boy-Girl (1904) Fanny Fern From Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855) Charlotte Perkins Gilman When I Was a Witch (1910) The Socialist and the Suffragist (1910) From Herland (1915) Angelina Weld Grimké El Beso (1923) The Want of You (1923) The Black Finger (1923) At April (1925) Trees (1928) Frances E. W. Harper Bible Defense of Slavery (1855) Eliza Harris (1855) Only one night beneath your roof (1859) Bury Me in a Free Land (1870) Learning to Read (1891) A Double Standard (1895) Pauline Hopkins Talma Gordon (1900) From Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902) Converting Fanny (1916) Julia Ward Howe From The Hermaphrodite (ca. 1846–47) Georgia Douglas Johnson Smothered Fires (1918) Foredoom (1918) My Little Dreams (1918) Maternity (1922) Utopia (1922) Credo (1922) Fusion (1922) When I Rise Up (1922) Amelia E. Johnson From Clarence and Corinne; or, God’s Way (1890) Maggie Pogue Johnson I Wish I Was a Grown Up Man (1910) Old Maid’s Soliloquy (1910) Emma Lazarus Carmela (1875) Dolores (1876) Assurance (ca. 1880) Adah Isaacs Menken Judith (1868) Myself (1868) Genius (1868) Drifts That Bar My Door (1868) Miserimus (1868) Ann Plato Advice to Young Ladies (1841) The Natives of America (1841) To the First of August (1841) Sarah Forten Purvis The Grave of the Slave (1831) An Appeal to Woman (1834) H. Cordelia Ray Niobe (1893) Lincoln (1893) William Lloyd Garrison (1910) Toussaint L’Ouverture (1910) Harriet Beecher Stowe Immediate Emancipation: A Sketch. (1845) From Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) Eloise Bibb Thompson Masks, A Story (1927) Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Lines to Ida B. Wells (1894) Clotelle—A Tale of Florida (1902) Bashy (1902) Harriet E. Wilson From Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) Constance Fenimore Woolson Miss Grief. (1880) Zitkala-Sa The Soft-Hearted Sioux (1901) Acknowledgments