The Hidden Hand

Or, Capitola the Madcap by E. D. E. N. Southworth

Edited by Joanne Dobson

Series: American Women Writers

Published by: Rutgers University Press

Subjects:Literature, Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Women's Studies, Literary Studies

544 Pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in

Paperback
9780813512969
Published: May 1, 1988

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

E.D.E.N. Southworth was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the nineteenth century and her Capitola Black, or Black Cap - a cross-dressing, adventure-seeking girl-woman - was so well-loved that the book was serialized three times between 1859 and 1888 and was dramatized in forty different versions. When we first meet sharp and witty Capitola she is living among beggars and street urchins, and dressed as a boy because a boy can get work and be safe, whereas a girl is left to starve for want of "proper" employment. Unknown to her, Capitola has a very rich elderly guardian who finds her at a providential moment and takes her back to his palatial mansion where she finds herself "decomposing above ground for want of having my blood stirred." But not to fear. There are bandits, true-loves, evil men, long-lost mothers, and sweet women friends in Capitola's future - not to mention thunder storms, kidnap attempts, and duels. The pace is fast, the action wonderfully unbelievable. This is escape literature at its nineteenth-century best, with a woman at its center who makes you feel strong, daring, and reckless.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes to Introduction
Selected Bibliography
A Note on the Text
The Hidden Hand
Explanatory Notes

Joanne Dobson teaches creative writing and American literature at Fordham University. She is the author of the Prof. Karen Pelletier academic mystery series and a founding editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

This comic melodrama draws for its humor and our contemporary interest upon the heroine's cross-dressing and cross-gender identification. ~Nineteenth-Century Literature

The Hidden Hand was a runaway best-seller when it was published in 1859; for years afterward, daring parents named their daughters Capitola, venturous women. ... Fun to read and an excellent text for simultaneously demonstrating the existence of 19th-century literary stereotypes of women and showing how one writer reveled in exploding them. ~Choice

[Southworths] labyrinthine story of kidnap, missing heirs, villians called Black Donald, and Amazon heroinism still entertains. A blend of swashbuckler, Horatio Alger story, domestic sentimentalism, and thriller, her book offers fantasies of feminine invincibility. ... it must hhave titilated many a homebound matron. ~Belles Lettres