What We Are Reading Today: ‘E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand’

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Updated 31 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand’

  • Southworth’s fiction tackled issues that were often considered taboo, including domestic violence, poverty and capital punishment

In her upcoming book, “E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Story of America’s Famous Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Author,” Rose Neal, who has a Ph.D. in English, revives the legacy of a now-obscure novelist who was once a household name.

Born in 1819, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte, Southworth — better known by her initials, E.D.E.N. — was one of the most prolific and widely read American writers of the 19th century.

Christened with a long name, Southworth once joked: “When I was born, my family was too poor to give anything else, so they gave me all those names.”

She would later shorten it to the distinctive E.D.E.N., under which she built her literary empire.

With more novels to her name than Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain combined, Southworth once captivated audiences with feisty heroines who rode horses, fired pistols, and even became sea captains.

Her most famous novel, “The Hidden Hand,” was so popular that readers named their daughters after its fearless protagonist, Capitola.

“Despite being one of the most beloved and well-known writers of the 19th century, as domestic sensational fiction declined in popularity, Southworth was entirely forgotten, as was an entire generation of women writers,” Neal writes. “For Southworth, it was partly because she had done so well at hiding her own progressive ideas. Nevertheless, she should be rediscovered and given her rightful place in American history.”

Southworth’s fiction tackled issues that were often considered taboo, including domestic violence, poverty and capital punishment.

Although she was raised in a slave-owning family, she wrote for The National Era, an abolitionist magazine, and encouraged her longtime friend Harriet Beecher Stowe to publish “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

She also supported the early women’s rights movement and advocated for better education and living conditions for those in poverty.

Neal’s journey to uncover Southworth’s story began unexpectedly as she pursued her master’s degree. She asked her colleagues whether they were familiar with this author she had unearthed. “They had never heard of Southworth or any of her novels,” she writes.

“How did a novelist as popular as Southworth slip into the dustbin of history?” she wonders.

With this biography, Neal pieces together Southworth’s story through her novels, letters and other documents, setting the record straight on a woman whose influence was far greater than history has acknowledged. Like her heroines, Southworth was bold, determined and ahead of her time.

The book comes out in May and is available for pre-order.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fuji: A Mountain in the Making’

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Updated 04 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fuji: A Mountain in the Making’

  • It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes

Author: ANDREW W. BERNSTEIN

Mount Fuji is everywhere recognized as a wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan.

Yet behind the picture-postcard image is a history filled with conflict and upheaval. Violent eruptions across the centuries wrought havoc and instilled fear.

It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes.

And while its soaring majesty has inspired countless works of literature and art, the foot of the mountain is home to military training grounds and polluting industries.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Aquarium’

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Updated 04 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Aquarium’

  • Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history

Aleksandar Hemon’s 2011 essay “The Aquarium” is an exploration of parental love, grief, and the isolating toll of confronting a child’s mortality. The essay was first published in The New Yorker and later appeared in “The Book of My Lives” in 2013.

Written with unflinching honesty, the piece chronicles Hemon’s experience navigating his infant daughter Isabel’s diagnosis of a rare brain tumor and the family’s agonizing journey through surgeries, chemotherapy, and loss.  

Hemon juxtaposes the clinical detachment of medical jargon — “external ventricular drain,” “stem-cell recovery” — with visceral snapshots: Isabel’s breath on his chest, her laughter amid IV drips, her small hand gripping his finger.

At the heart of the essay lies the metaphor of an aquarium where the family exists in a suffocating bubble, visible to the outside world but severed from its rhythms.

Central to the narrative is Hemon’s elder daughter Ella, who processes her sister’s illness through an imaginary brother, Mingus.

Stylistically, Hemon oscillates between reporter-like precision and raw vulnerability. He rejects platitudes about suffering’s “ennobling” nature, writing: “Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world.”

The essay’s power lies in its refusal to soften despair, instead confronting the “indelible absence” grief leaves behind.

Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, he doesn’t just tell stories; he uses language to find pockets of hope in shattered lives.

Think of him as a guide through the chaos of modern exile — equal parts poet and provocateur.

 

 


What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms

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Updated 03 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms

  • In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy

Author: Ian Duncan

The 120 years between Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time.

In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses, even as the two were separating into distinct domains.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Utopianism for a Dying Planet

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Updated 02 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Utopianism for a Dying Planet

  • The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability

Author: Gregory Claeys

In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. 

“Utopianism for a Dying Planet” examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today’s thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe.

The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability.
Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Making of Barbarians’ by Haun Saussy

Updated 01 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Making of Barbarians’ by Haun Saussy

Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China.

The Making of Barbarians offers an account of world literature in which China, as center, produces its own margins.

Here Sinologist and comparatist Haun Saussy investigates the meanings of literary translation, adaptation, and appropriation on the boundaries of China long before it came into sustained contact with the West.

When scholars talk about comparative literature in Asia, they tend to focus on translation between European languages and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as practiced since about 1900.

In contrast, Saussy focuses on the period before 1850, when the translation of foreign works into Chinese was rare because Chinese literary tradition overshadowed those around it.

“The Making of Barbarians” looks closely at literary works that were translated into Chinese from foreign languages or resulted from contact with alien peoples.