Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess

SUSAN K HARRIS currently is Professor of American Literature at Penn StateUniversity, University Park. Previously, she taught for fifteen years at QueensCollege, of the City University of New York. Her publications include TheCourtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (Cambridge University Press, 1996); 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies (Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Mark Twain's Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (University of Missouri Press, 1982). She has also edited Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (Penguin, 1999); and Mark Twain: Historical Romances (The Library of America, 1994). Her essays have appeared in collections published by Oxford, Johns Hopkins, and Rutgers University presses, and in journals such as American Literature, New England Quarterly, and Studies in the Novel. She has edited Legacy: A Journal of American Women's Writing, and has served on advisory boards for Leviathan: the Melville Society Journal, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Mark Twain, and the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.

"Thoroughly engaging for readers fascinated by the nineteenth century, and essential reading for understanding the complex ways women have found to wield cultural and political influence." - Marjorie Pryse, University at Albany "In this scintillatingly-written book, as intelligent as the conversations generated by the two hostesses that are its main subject, Harris serves up to a wide audience a virtual feast of well-prepared information. As an important contribution to the new and growing field of trans-Atlantic studies, the book offers a range of methods for future work while it lays out a broad social panorama." - Adrienne Munich, author of Queen Victoria s Secrets

• Introduction: The Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess The Hostess as a Diarist The Hostess as a Correspondent Moral Landscapes: Mary Gladstone's Reading Community The Hostess as the Historian of a Reading Community: Annie Fields Balancing Acts: The Hostess and the New Bureaucratic Order