The female cotton textile workers of nineteenth-century New England are well known to and documented by historians. Not only were they the first American women to undertake waged labour away from home, they also gained a reputation for their diverse literary productions and related social concerns. Yet, until now, these women's literary concerns have received little scholarly attention. Cook examines the literary response of this first wave of women to experience the early stages of economic independence, ideals of selfhood, and gender and class expectations. She notes the importance of waged factory labour to the rise of working-class literary pursuits, as well as the women's newfound female agency.

The intersections between work and writing, as well as its relationship with class and gender assumptions, are traced from the well-known works of the Lowell mill girls, including the Lowell Offering and Lucy Larcom's epic poem, An Idyll of Work, through several generations of working-class women writers, concluding in the early twentieth century. Cook emphasizes the continuity amongst these working-class women seeking to satisfy the needs of both body and spirit. As the nineteenth century wore on, these women's ideas became increasingly radical. Throughout the period of study, the combination of wage-earning and literary opportunities impacted women of all classes. Cook's analysis of the continuity in these factory women's literary works contributes a valuable new angle to the growing body of work on the history of class in the United States.

Nevertheless, I found parts of the book disjointed. Chapter 4 analyses three Romantic American male novelists – Judd, Hawthorne and Melville. This chapter seemed misplaced in an analysis of the writings of working-class women. While these male authors made a valid argument about the importance of fiction in gaining new audiences and authors, it suggests a different direction for the book – namely the relationships between gender, work and literary concerns and opportunities. Furthermore, while the continuity between the aspirations of the early cotton workers and the later garment women is clear in their writings, additional comment about the impact of the changing nature of women's waged work on their literary concerns would have been helpful. By the early twentieth century, the fictional writings of female cotton workers had virtually disappeared. What does this absence of literary productions say about the new generation of cotton factory women dealing with the speed-ups and declining wages and conditions in an industry that was facing increasing competition from southern states? Why did the garment workers pick up the writing and literary aspirations where the cotton operatives left off?

These minor criticisms aside, the autonomy of the working-class women writers is clear. This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature – historical and literary – about the varieties of women workers' agency and the importance of social, economic and cultural expectations on the development, forms and direction of working-class women's agency.