The wide recognition of the Victorian women, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Mrs. Browning, and their American contemporaries, Margaret Fuller and Mrs. Stowe, had given the impetus, and the enormous popularity of prose fiction, a literary form peculiarly adapted to feminine treatment, the opportunity. During all the period the work of women dominated to a large degree the literary output.
The earliest group to appear was made up of daughters of the Brahmins--Louisa M. Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Helen Hunt Jackson, and others--transition figures who clung to the old New England tradition, yet were touched by the new forces. The representative figure is Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Daughter and granddaughter of theologians and divinity professors, reared in the atmosphere of the Andover theological seminary of the earlier period, she was a daughter of her generation, a perfect sample of the culminating feminine product of two centuries of New England Puritanism--sensitive to the brink of physical collapse, intellectual, disquieted of soul, ridden of conscience, introspective. We know the type perfectly. Miss Jewett, Mrs. Freeman, Miss Brown, have drawn us scores of these women--the final legatees of Puritanism, daughters of Transcendentalists and abolitionists and religious wranglers.
Literature to this group of women was not only a heritage from the past, from great shadowy masters who were mere names and books, it was a home product in actual process of manufacture about their cradles. The mother of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps--Elizabeth Stuart--had published in 1851 _Sunny-Side_, a simple story of life in a country parsonage, that had sold one hundred thousand copies in one year. She had followed it with _A Peep at Number Five_, a book that places her with Mrs. Stowe as a pioneer depicter of New England life, and then, at the very opening of her career, she had died in 1852. "It was impossible to be her daughter and not to write. Rather, I should say, impossible to be _their_ daughter and not to have something to say, and a pen to say it."[104] The daughter was publishing at thirteen; at nineteen she was the author of twelve Sunday-school books;[104] at twenty-four she had issued _The Gates Ajar_, which was to go through twenty editions the first year and to be translated into the principal European languages.