In Between the Novel and the News, Sari Edelstein identifies a set of texts by nineteenth-century American women that is linked by their “rhetorical and imaginative critiques of the press” (149). In this sense, the book contributes to ongoing efforts to categorize women's writing both in the curriculum and in literary history by connecting works that are not usually grouped together. Even as her chapters offer discrete studies of various authors, the book as a whole shows how we can relate Judith Sargent Murray's The Story of Margaretta to the short stories of Maude Eaton, or Catharine Williams's efforts to humanize a fallen woman in Fall River (a critically understudied text) to Louisa May Alcott's “authentic” narrative in Hospital Sketches. In Edelstein's analysis, there is a trajectory of women's writing that can be seen as responding to the burgeoning nineteenth-century press. At the same time, the book demonstrates the degree to which this writing deserves and rewards close reading, or what Edelstein calls an “interpretive generosity and rigor often reserved for works considered more complex” (153).

Edelstein's main focus is on newspapers, with chapters focussing on selected writers’ responses to a publishing arc that begins with late eighteenth-century partisan political papers and ends with the yellow journalism of the late nineteenth century. Similarly, as her title implies, she is focussed on the novel as a particular countersite to this evolving newspaper culture. However, her analysis includes not just newspapers but also periodicals and other forms of print, just as her exemplary texts include short stories, novellas and memoirs. As she acknowledges, women writers were not alone in being influenced by their reading of newspapers and other journalistic media. The benefit of Edelstein's focussed approach is that it highlights the linkages between specific genres: the partisan paper and the penny press, on the one hand, and the sentimental novel on the other; the antebellum story paper and the sensational novel; Civil War journalism and “eyewitness literature”; and yellow journalism and the pseudo-Gothic. As her close readings reveal, these generic categories are themselves often unstable. E. D. E. N. Southworth's sensational The Hidden Hand, for example, is also “a city mystery, a plantation romance, and even a sentimental novel” (73), a compendium that is analogous to the varied contents of the story papers that were popular at the same time. Such generic indeterminacy is, in Edelstein's view, part of a specific authorial project that seeks to counteract or augment the relatively flat and often one-dimensional reporting of the news.

Edelstein is clear that her book does not present an exhaustive account of nineteenth-century journalism, and she intentionally gives more attention to close readings of her highlighted texts than to the nuances of the publishing culture in which she places them. This emphasis can sometimes make her contextual summaries overly truncated, but her close readings are a highlight of the book and lead to some memorable interpretations. How can we ever see Alcott's Tribulation Periwinkle in the same light once Edelstein has pointed out the connection between the shorthand for her name (Trib) and for the exceedingly successful New York Tribune? And how can Charlotte Perkins Gilman's yellow wallpaper be seen the same way once Edelstein has associated it with popular descriptions of tabloid “yellow” journalism? Edelstein shows how the writers she examines not only recast the journalism of their time but also use their own writing to foreground issues of representation. In her readings, Catharine Sedgwick's Live and Let Live “thematizes factuality itself” (58), Southworth's Capitola analogizes “the disruptive potential” of the story paper (77), Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes theorizes “the production of knowledge” (103), and Maude Eaton's character Mark Carson becomes “a figure for the white newspaper industry” (144). Edelstein acknowledges Michael T. Gilmore's influence on her work, and like Gilmore's foundational American Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985), her book shows how preoccupied nineteenth-century American writers were with theorizing and offering meta-critical perspectives on their own conditions of authorship.

Such a focus creates a coherent and illuminating frame through which to view this set of texts. At the same time, this focus limits the degree to which the book can explore the other primary issue it explicitly raises, which is the ways in which seeing women writers as responding to the news recasts our understanding of their public and political roles. As Edelstein points out, these women were engaged with questions of nation building and rebuilding. Yet their reading and writing were still largely situated within accepted norms of domestic activity. Edelstein also deemphasizes the degree to which these writers’ projects were mediated by their relationships with the editors, publishers, and mentors who helped control and shape their movement from manuscript to print. Nevertheless, Between the Novel and the News provides a fresh and compelling look at the ways in which a variety of women writers negotiated and theorized the aesthetic, ethical, and generic dimensions of their work.