E.D.E.N. Southworth's Hidden Hand : The Untold Story of America's Famous Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Author

E.D.E.N. Southworth (Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte) was one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific and successful authors, with more novels to her credit than Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain combined.She was widely beloved by readers for her feisty heroines who rode horses, shot pistols or bows and arrows, captured notorious villains, became sea captains, and had other such grand adventures.Readers named their daughters, their boats, and their racehorses Capitola after their new favorite character in Emma’s bestselling 1859 novel The Hidden Hand, which sold 10,000 copies in the first print run. In her fifty novels, Southworth wrote about unspeakable topics for the time: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty, capital punishment, and other social issues-many of which readers still grapple with today-all nicely tucked away within the pages of her “domestic fiction.” Despite being raised in a slave-owning family, her first works appeared in The National Era, a known a