Gender and Genre in Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson's Periodical Writing

Abstract

Abstract Despite scholarly recovery of many nineteenth-century women writers, especially those publishing mainly in periodicals, the fiction, travel writing and journalism of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1840–1914) are still neglected. Situating Van de Grift Stevenson in the context of late nineteenth-century US periodical culture, this article considers how many of the author’s periodical writings cross not only geographical but also generic boundaries. Van de Grift Stevenson’s periodical publishing appears in a variety of modes and genres, at times with journalistic material entering her fiction, domestic life including recipes inserted in her journalism, and autobiography glimpsed in both fiction and journalism. The article examines this author’s transatlantic periodical writings in the context of gender and genre, noting the ways in which these categories intersect throughout her authorship. Focusing especially on the author’s regional writing as seen in her non-fiction ‘cookbook articles’ Ramblings of a Housewife and the short story ‘The Warlock’s Shadow’, the article argues that Van de Grift Stevenson’s blending of regional and domestic modes of writing presents a specific interrogation of cultural and geographical identities.