Dastardly villains are no match for Capitola Black, the audacious heroine at the center of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s 1859 bestseller, The Hidden Hand. Readers so admired this literary tomboy’s pluck that Capitola became a popular baby name for decades and inspired the name of a California town. Yet few readers today are familiar with Southworth, one of the highest-earning authors of her day (to whom Louisa May Alcott even gave a subtle nod in Little Women). Rose Neal, author of a brand new biography on Southworth, joins us this week to discuss the writer who gave 19th-century young women permission to imagine lives free from convention and restraint.
Mentioned in this episode:
E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Story of America’s Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Author by Rose Neal
The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth
The Company of Books bookstore
Retribution by E.D.E.N. Southworth
The Deserted Wife by E.D.E.N. Southworth
Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
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