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Of the gender ideology that informed her era, reformer Lucy Stone said in 1854, "Too much has already been said and written about women's sphere. Leave women, then, to find their sphere." Responding to declarations like Stone's, as well as to other complicating evidence, recent scholarship has challenged an absolute distinction between the nineteenth-century's "separate sphere." even as it affirms this ideology's legacy to twentieth-century attitudes. Caroline Field Levander's Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture furthers this project of recovery, concentrating not on the contributions of orators like Stone, but on fictional renderings of female voice in the United States from the 1830s to the 1880s. As Levander argues, "Because these fictional voices represent novelists' attempts to deploy within narrative the political power of the female voice -- in short, to bridge the gap between `real' and representational worlds -- they become a particularly rich place to search for traces of that voice's cultural significance" (5).
Levander's search leads her to consider a range of works by nineteenth-century American authors, both...