19th century

Behind a Mask is one of the thrillers, mysteries, and sensational works Louisa May Alcott published under the pen name A.M. Bernard. It was first published in 1866, and then re-published in 1975 by scholar, rare book dealer, and biographer Madeleine B. Stern. Further readership and analysis of the novella has helped expand understanding of Alcott's work and interests. The story subverts expectations around gender performance, class, and heroism as it follows Jean Muir, a down-on-her-luck actress who disguises herself as a young governess and infiltrates a wealthy family.
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"Cita Press’ An Immortal Book: Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far brings together autobiographical essays and short stories from different periods in Eaton’s career, showcasing her range as a storyteller, thinker, and stylist. Revered for her contributions to Asian American and Asian Canadian literature, Sui Sin Far is also a key figure in early women’s journalism, literature, and feminism. A master at developing characters and rendering place, she grappled with themes of identity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and politics in ways that still resonate today."
Download our reading companion, "The Divine Right of Learning," for more background on Sui Sin Far, the history behind the stories, and reflections from writing and scholars working to recover Sui Sin Far's legacy.
Mary Shelley wrote Mathilda from 1819-1820, shortly after her novel Frankenstein was an immediate popular hit--but it wasn't published until more than a century later. Narrated by a young woman on her deathbed, the novella explores grief, despair, and redemption. Despite its deployment of familiar Gothic themes like suicide, incest, and a woman withering away, its framing is frequently read as a feminist reclamation of the genre.
Ten Days in a Mad-House compiles Nellie Bly's reporting from her first undercover assignment for the New York World in 1887. She disguised herself as "a crazy person" in order to get herself admitted to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt's Island). She spent ten days there as a patient before the World secured her release. Her articles led to a grand jury investigation and a major budget expansion for New York State asylums.

While Bly's projects were often framed as stunts— by her paper and others—Ten Days is a serious examination of what happens to women that society finds inconvenient (whether or not they have an illness). Bly describes her experience with frank horror while also deploying her trademark observational humor, trained on the absurdity of the institution and the people who uphold its abuses. Cita's edition positions this landmark text within the tradition of feminist literature about women's experiences with mental illness, mental health treatment, and in mental institutions.
“'The Yellow Wall-Paper' (1892) holds an important place among rediscovered works by turn-of-the-century American women writers for its bold critique of gender politics in a patriarchal society. The nameless narrator, undergoing the infamous rest cure for what doctors now diagnose as postpartum depression, experiences debilitating psychological effects. At first repulsed by the wallpaper in the room where she is sequestered in a country estate, the narrator comes to like it as she vows to decode its pattern—she imagines many women creeping behind bars and identifies with one trapped woman, arguably a reflection of her painful position as a woman in Victorian America. Many of the story’s first readers considered it a psychological horror tale in the fashion of Poe." - Catherine J. Golden
"The first time I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl I was in an undergraduate women writers course at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2004. My coming into consciousness as a Black feminist had not yet revealed itself; however I knew that Jacobs’ story of strength, perseverance, and courage would beckon me to pick it up again and again throughout my life. Jacobs’ writerly voice, deeply multilayered, was doing many things: championing the cause of the enslaved, actualizing her own plight as a survivor, and redeeming herself as woman." -Dr. Christy Hyman

Harriet Jacobs' 1861 autobiography is a landmark text for the U.S. abolitionist movement that continues to inspire and influence art, scholarship, and literature nearly two centuries after it was first published under the pseudonym Linda Brent.
Family curses, demonic doppelgangers, lingering loss, and redemption--Gaskell's 1856 gothic ghost story presents a suspenseful tale with a feminist frame. The anchor to the story is Irish servant Bridget FitzGerald, whose power and fierce pain drives the story's conflict and, ultimately, its resolution, influencing the fates of entire families and towns.
"No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements."

"Silly Novels by Silly Lady Novelists" appeared anonymously in the Westminster Review in 1856. The essay argued that contemporary popular novels for and by women played into tropes and assumptions that undercut the actual aptitudes of women in a frustrating and, ultimately, dangerous way. The author, Mary Ann Evans, deployed a wit and honesty that she would later use to examine the foibles of a wide range of characters in the realist novels she published under her now-famous pseudonym: George Eliot.
"Passion’s necessity may be one of the lessons we can take from Chopin’s controversial text, but certainly it is not the only lesson. The novel emerged from obscurity like a different kind of storm: taking the literary world to new heights and awareness of what women writers could do." - Heather Ostman

Kate Chopin's 1899 novel tells the story of Edna Pontellier as she seeks to expand her life beyond the boundaries of Creole society and the restrictive expectations for wives and mothers. Called everything from "poison" to ""not altogether wholesome in its tendencies" upon publication, The Awakening is now recognized as a classic of feminist literature that also laid the stylistic foundation for modernist Southern fiction.