This deeply researched and beautifully crafted study takes as its subject a generation of women who came to maturity in America's Gilded Age. They were scientists and social workers, physicians and educators, and, perhaps most notably, Progressive reformers engaged in the pursuit of social justice. Claiming the newly available opportunities for higher education and professional employment, these women successfully pursued lives in uncharted territory. Barbara Sicherman introduces us to a less visible but equally salient factor in their journey to public identities marked by achievement and acclaim—their sustained and sustaining engagement with reading.

Situating her subjects in individual reading communities, Sicherman keeps company with other cultural historians and literary critics in the rapidly expanding field of book history. With them she builds upon scholarship that has focused on the physical attributes of books and the circumstances surrounding their publication, distribution, and circulation. Well-Read Lives, itself a signal contribution, presents an opportunity to reckon where we stand in the field, particularly in our current concern with the hermeneutics of reading and writing practices. Sicherman's focus invites us as well to consider what we have learned about the relationship between reading and gender, a subject that cultural historians and literary critics have engaged with increasing sophistication during the last three decades. In this regard, the study also represents an important contribution to women's and gender studies. In the rich contextualization of the individual readers she studies and of the communities in which they participated, Barbara Sicherman sets the marker in terms of what can now be achieved.Footnote ¹

That we have traveled no little distance from the “affective fallacy” insisted upon by W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe Beardsley to the “poaching” posited by Michel de Certeau is to deal in understatement. Defenders of a New Criticism, which made the text itself the only valid object of criticism, Wimsatt and Beardsley dismissed any approach that considered “psychological effects.” All such readings offered nothing but “impressionism” and “relativism.” Unwittingly (and ironically) they articulated the antithetical position taken decades later by de Certeau. For this theorist of the Practices of Everyday Life, “impressionism” was the reader's response, “relativism” the historical context shaping the response. Highlighting the agency exercised by a reader, de Certeau claimed that, whatever an author's intentions, readers could and did remake texts to suit their own purposes.Footnote ²

Literary critics Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser had prepared the ground for de Certeau. Jauss and Iser, who were early proponents of a reception-oriented criticism, made readers cocreators with authors. Colleagues at the University of Konstanz for three decades, they articulated models that can be seen as complementary. Jauss posited a “horizon of expectations,” inviting readers to explore “unrealized possibilities” and “avenues for future experience,” while Iser suggested that they filled “gaps” in the text and in the process enhanced its meaning. Although Jauss's and Iser's revisions represented an important departure, they left the status of the text intact. Readers’ responses were contingent, and texts, at least those deemed canonical, were said to transcend time and place. Stanley Fish took the more radical step: setting aside textual criticism for analysis of the responses of readers themselves. Studying the reader's experience instead of the formal structure of the text, Fish displaced the latter and concentrated on readers who became the makers of meaning. Simultaneously, however, Fish placed constraints on their role, arguing that the conventions, the “ways of knowing,” of the “interpretive community” with which a reader identified had a definitive impact. Not surprisingly, Fish's “interpretive community” was constituted by literary critics who anticipated writing their responses into publication. Fish's proposition reorganized the distinctions between readers and texts. In this process, as Jane Tompkins has noted, “reading and writing join hands, change places, and finally become distinguishable only as two names for the same activity.” The “return of the reader” has played a signal role in revising and expanding the scope of literary criticism. Cultural historians, who have welcomed as well the “return of the reader,” have chosen not to set aside the text and instead have taken the position that individuals read in and with a text. They have also emphasized that the degree and the character of this interplay depend on a specific and highly individualized context. Whatever the differences in approach, we have all come to understand that meaning comes into being in acts of reading, many of which take place in communities whose members share an experiential lens.Footnote ³

Cultural historians have taken the lead in situating those acts and communities in historical context. Edited by David D. Hall and John B. Hench, Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book: America, 1639–1876, published in 1987 and drawn from papers delivered at a conference held at the American Antiquarian Society three years earlier, introduced scholars to the field's current state and its future prospects. The editors and contributors of the volume—part survey, part manifesto—emphasized the need to attend to historical context in making generalizations about printing, publishing, distribution, and reading. Robert Darnton, a participant in the conference and already a leading figure in the field, did the same in “First Steps toward a History of Reading.” Noting what had already been accomplished in identifying “the ‘who,’ the ‘what, the ‘when,’ and the ‘where’” in reader response and reception, he called for investigation of the “why” and the “how” of reading. In a series of groundbreaking essays on the Cultures of Print in colonial America, Hall mapped some of those “whys” and “hows.” Noting that the field had been cultivated initially by historians of Europe, he acknowledged his debt to scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis, who had emphasized the agency exercised by ordinary people. Hall's people were early New Englanders, most of whom were able to read and to participate in a Protestant vernacular tradition in which the high and the low, the learned and the popular, converged. Practicing what Hall called “traditional literacy,” they read “steady sellers” intensively rather than extensively, returning again and again to the Bible and to the relatively few devotional works available to them, reading aloud, reciting, and committing passages to memory. More recently, Mathew Brown has highlighted the degree to which they moved back and forth among the pages of their “steady sellers,” collating passages and assembling those that related to each other into handwritten documents. Print was remade into manuscript and took new life in scribal culture, an equally important site of seventeenth-century text making. In these compilations, we glimpse these New Englanders’ personal histories of reading and writing.Footnote ⁴

A History of the Book in America, which has appeared in five volumes in the last decade, carries the interrelated stories of print, publishing, reading, and writing from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. In these topically and thematically organized volumes that together number 3,175 pages, we learn not only “what,” “when,” and “where” Americans read but also “how” and “why” they took to print. The triumphalist progression from scarcity to abundance, from intensive to extensive reading, presumed by many scholars has proven upon examination to be decidedly more complicated. Technological innovations propelled the shift from scarcity to abundance. The improvements in transportation, the continuing expansion of the postal system, and the emergence of large publishing houses in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston made possible rapid distribution of print. But as printed words and images increased in number, diversified in genre and form, and extended their reach in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they commingled with other modes that remained crucial in the construction of identity and community. Older forms of expression and communication, including manuscript composition and circulation and oral performance, persisted in the small-scale, face-to-face, settings of everyday life.

In short, no single mode of reading and writing prevailed among a diverse people with all sorts of reasons to engage print and scribal culture. With the increasing availability of titles designed for every taste, Americans did embrace diversity and choice and did begin to read extensively. However, they did not cast aside earlier practices, instead duplicating the same intensive reading, the same extraction of meanings, the same recording, and the same meditation in a radically different context. Print proliferated, but in various manuscript forms Americans continued to command particular texts. Commonplacing, an increasingly popular discipline in which readers transcribed passages from a variety of literatures, resembled seventeenth-century practices. Letters, diaries and journals were still more typical sites at which individuals inscribed personal histories of reading and writing in which intensive and extensive approaches intermingled. Americans engaged print in churches, family gatherings, private and public libraries, voluntary societies, common schools, and institutions of higher education, all of which continued, as they had in the past, to act as social and cultural mediators. These, then, were some of the traces of past reading and writing practices that endured in a century of enormous social, economic, cultural, and political change.Footnote ⁵

Increasingly in the nineteenth century, literacy became a cultural imperative. Increasingly as well, women looked to reading as a resource for intellectual stimulation and imaginative pleasure. They also built upon examples of eighteenth-century women who met to read and write together. Hannah Adams and Milcah Martha Moore illustrate the degree to which reading and writing intersected in these collaborations. The first American woman to support herself by her pen, Adams forged intellectual and emotional bonds in a circle organized by young women in her village of Medfield, Massachusetts who “like myself had imbibed a taste for reading.” Reading served as a point of departure for the poetry and prose they composed themselves, which were “read and admired by the whole little circle.” Rural and urban residents of the Delaware Valley, the friends who gathered around Moore also circulated their poetry and prose. Moore copied nearly one hundred of their manuscripts into “Martha Moore's Book,” as she titled a volume that documented a scribal culture based on the collective practices of reading and writing. Sociable forms of reading and writing grew exponentially throughout the nineteenth-century as hundreds of thousands of women, white and black, met in reading circles, literary societies, and study clubs. These gatherings served the same purposes as their eighteenth-century counterparts. Learning how to discipline their minds and sharpen their analytical faculties, they moved from basic to expressive literacy. An important concept introduced by Sicherman, expressive literacy, which she defines as the ability to read and write with ease and to employ these skills for self-defined objectives, had expansive potential for women who sought opportunities in the public world. They also found in these settings sources of inspiration. Participatory and performative, the collaborations stimulated writing, encouraging some women to embark on professional careers.Footnote ⁶

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Declaring that “all girls are what they read,” Rose Pastor told readers of the Yiddishes Tageblatt to “ask any girl whom you have never met before what books she reads and, if she answers truthfully, you will know her, heart and soul” (13). Perhaps, but, as literary critics and cultural historians remind us, we also need to know the context in which individuals took to their books. The reading and writing Sicherman's subjects practiced were marked by transformations in literacy, in print publication and circulation, and in educational and vocational opportunities that took place over the course of the nineteenth century. Perhaps most notably in terms of reading and writing, women achieved parity in literacy relative to their male counterparts. This was no small matter. In the year 1800, slightly less than half of the nation's white women commanded alphabetic literacy. Fifty years later, the US Census reported that ninety percent of the white population was literate. As students at female academies and seminaries, hundreds of thousands of women moved from basic to expressive literacy. Some of these students pursued careers as writers and editors, others, who entered the nation's classrooms, came to constitute fifty-nine percent of the nation's public-school teachers by 1870. Vocational and educational opportunities continued to expand with the establishment of women's colleges and the admission of women to formerly all-male colleges and universities. Now able to train for a variety of professions, they embarked on careers in medicine and science. Women, who early in the nineteenth century had become an important market force, both as consumers and as producers of print, took primary responsibility later in the century for transmitting a family-based literary culture. Participants in this culture privileged the Bible, the classics of Western culture, and canonical British and American literature. Sicherman's white and relatively elite subjects discovered a trajectory that took them from a family parlor to a wide variety of spaces in the larger world. Not so for the less advantaged of Sicherman's subjects, who had to overcome formidable obstacles to achieve expressive literacy and public identities.

Barbara Sicherman divides her readers into two clusters—those who were privileged readers and those who were not. This strategy has obvious advantages. We can register the degree to which social location determined an individual's access to books. We can explore whether and to what degree status affected the mediating role played by institutions such as family, school, library, and church. We can observe the practices of interpretive communities in a variety of settings. In addition, the individuals Sicherman has chosen invite us to consider the impact of geographical location. Her readers, both privileged and unprivileged, move us beyond the more typical focus on the Northeast, taking us to Fort Wayne, Indiana and Cedarville, Illinois, to Memphis and Chicago.

Sicherman begins in Fort Wayne, Indiana with the third generation of the Hamiltons, an elite family whose parents provided their daughters with exceptional access to books and opportunities to read intensively as well as extensively. Two of those daughters are remembered today—Edith Hamilton, whose best-selling commentaries on classical civilization are still in print, and Alice Hamilton, an early authority in industrial medicine and resident of Hull House, who was appointed Harvard's first woman professor. Books were a shared passion for Edith, Alice, and their sisters. “When the Hamiltons thought of each other, they thought of each other reading,” as Sicherman remarks (80). Together they illustrate the formative power and the mediating role of a family-centered literary culture in which reading was a constant. Whatever the book, reading and schooling were one. Reading widely in the British canon, the daughters also received instruction in German and French and were taught Latin by their father, who supervised their education. Edith, Alice, and their sisters constituted an interpretive community that acted as confidently as any of Stanley Fish's literary critics. They accorded special status to particular texts and made meaning by their own codes. Reading and rereading, memorizing and reciting, they engaged in oral performance in their informal reading circles. The Hamiltons were educated at home until they were seventeen, and then, like generations of elite daughters before them, they were sent to a female seminary. At Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, they continued their study of ancient and modern languages and British literature. When they returned home, Edith and Alice embarked on ambitious programs of study that were linked to the careers they envisioned for themselves—Edith preparing the Greek and Latin necessary for enrollment at Bryn Mawr College, Alice studying chemistry at a local medical school before leaving for the University of Michigan Medical School. Their reading, which they had always linked with freedom and possibility, sustained them as they embarked on vocations deemed masculine by their contemporaries. Reading “a little Odyssey before breakfast,” Edith enacted her passion for Greek on a daily basis (105). Alice found in The Merv Oasis, a book of travels, a catalyst—“I meant to be a medical missionary to Teheran having been fascinated by [its] description of Persia” (104).

Like the Hamiltons, Jane Addams spent her childhood in the Midwest, found her way to reading and writing in a family-centered literary culture and took her schooling at a female seminary. Eventually, and after a protracted struggle, Addams made the same decision as Alice Hamilton, dedicating her life to service. Initially, however, she was drawn to several forms of heroic individualism. Not surprisingly, the male models with whom she identified collided with a prescribed destiny that entailed serving others. The habits of reading and writing, which were key to the construction of her subjectivity, were the means to resolution. Addams was eclectic—she began with Pope's Iliad, Dryden's Virgil, and Plutarch's Parallel Lives, all of which she found in her father's library; she proceeded to Dickens, Elizabeth Phelps, Arnold, Thomas De Quincey, Carlyle, George Eliot, Ruskin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She became a member of a “Littery Society” at the age of ten. Reading and writing continued apace at Rockford Female Seminary, where she was a member of the school's literary society and served as editor-in-chief of the Rockford Seminary Magazine. Still in what Sicherman calls her “Carylean and Emersonian phase” (147), Addams told her classmates at the Seminary that there had been a shift in their generation's aspirations “from accomplishments and the arts of pleasing to the development of . . . intellectual force, and capabilities for direct labor.” Simultaneously, she was already beginning to circumscribe that individualistic model of achievement. “We,” she added in her address, “will strive to idealize our labor and thus happily fulfill woman's noblest mission” (149). It would be another decade before Addams made her particular mission tangible in Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. Hull House made its most visible mark in campaigns against sweatshops, industrial diseases, and child labor. Less visible but no less significant, the settlement house's educational and cultural initiatives had a marked impact on both the residents and their surrounding neighbors. Designed to further intellectual growth and social connections, Hull House's reading parties and classes resembled antebellum reading circles, literary societies, and mutual-improvement associations. Critical thought and cultural production went hand in hand with enriched bonds. Reading aloud and reciting passages, hosts and guests immersed themselves in Robert Browning, Emerson, George Eliot, Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Shakespeare. Some scholars have criticized Hull House's cross-class reading parties and classes as a patronizing imposition of elite culture. Addams saw the matter differently, as Sicherman notes. Familiarizing oneself with literary icons was less a matter of erudition than a type of “extended experience.” Books, in Addam's anticipation of Hans Robert Jauss's “horizon of expectation,” served as bridges “to get over the differences raised by barriers and traditions, that really we may be fair-minded and may know people as they really are” (155).

The same ambition that fueled the Hamiltons’ intellectual engagement and professional careers is readily apparent in M. Carey Thomas. The adolescent who recalled as an adult that she had “been carried away by Carlyle & ‘mildly enchanted by Emerson’” also immersed herself in classical texts as she searched for exemplars (109). In this she resembled no one more than Margaret Fuller, who read the same texts and recalled as an adult that the Greeks and Romans had impressed her with the importance of “earnest purpose,” of “self-command,” of “force of expression.”Footnote ⁷ She considered these luminaries her companions, their struggles her inspiration. In reading themselves into these texts, Thomas and Fuller laid claim to characteristics that had been considered the possession of men. Books sparked dreams, taking Thomas to “the place of elsewhere,” the place of self-discovery that did not limit female ambition (110). Thomas identified with characters in Alcott's Little Women and Carlyle's On Heroes. That she was able to find in such dissimilar texts and characters powerful models illustrates the degree to which a reader might “poach” in acts of appropriation. The Jo March that Thomas took as her persona was the writer who succeeded in the literary marketplace, not the woman who married the awkward German professor, Friedrich Bhaer. Reading Carlyle's characters in the same fashion as Fuller had taken to the Greeks and Romans, Thomas inserted herself into On Heroes: “my one aim & concentrated purpose shall be & and is to show that a woman can learn can reason can compete with man in the grand fields of literature and science” (116). Reading was the vehicle. “I began to read for myself and my education began,” as she declared (111, original emphasis).

In the same fashion as women before her, Thomas wrote as she read, keeping a commonplace book, compiling lists of the literature in which she immersed herself, and composing poems and short stories. Like Edith and Alice Hamilton and Jane Addams, she attended a female seminary, in her case the Quaker Howland Institute. Thomas completed an undergraduate degree at Cornell University in two years, and returned home before leaving for graduate study in Europe. Like the Hamiltons, who had returned to Fort Wayne, Indiana, she embarked on an intensive program of study. One of the vehicles was the Friday Night, a self-consciously feminist reading and writing circle. Constituting an interpretive community that resembled those posited by Stanley Fish, the five friends, who had been drawn together by shared literary interests, read Shelley, William Godwin, Swinburne, and Gabriel Rossetti. Together they wrote a novel, each of them drafting alternating chapters. Simultaneously, they endowed their enterprise with a purpose different from the interpretive community envisioned by Fish. For them reading was less a performance of conventions deployed by a particular community than a social act of friendship and collaborative support. Like the solitary reading that enabled individual acts of self-definition, collective engagement furnished imaginative spaces and alternative models in and through which women envisioned new possibilities for their lives, and then, shaped by their reading, acted to make those possibilities realities. Thomas did exactly that and, in doing so, realized her dream—earning a PhD in philology at the University of Zurich, founding with members of the Friday Night the Bryn Mawr School, and serving as president of Bryn Mawr College for nearly three decades. All these achievements, which were initiated in encounters with print, were embodiments of Thomas's most basic ambition, demonstrating women's intellectual equality with men.

Like their privileged counterparts, Rose Cohen and Mary Antin looked to books to help them craft more expansive and more meaningful lives. For these daughters of Jewish immigrants, literacy alone was a significant achievement. Because of the devaluation of women's literacy relative to their male counterparts, the gender gap in the early twentieth-century Jewish immigrant population was larger than that in other immigrant groups from eastern Europe. Public schools provided rudimentary training for boys and girls. That Cohen and Antin did not stop there and instead achieved the expressive literacy that made their autobiographies powerful testifies to the importance of encounters with print. “Just to read became a necessity and a joy,” as Cohen recalled (201). “Necessity” derived from a need for a refuge from the severe constraints of life on the Lower East Side. The “joy” spoke to the sense of possibility experienced in reading. Cohen's narrative, as Sicherman shows, illustrated two transitions—from traditional to modern literacy and from basic to expressive literacy. Her experience stood in sharp contrast to the Hamiltons, Addams, and Thomas. For them immersing themselves in books and coming to command expressive literacy fulfilled the ideals of a family-centered literary culture. Cohen's passion for reading was an act of rebellion against a patriarchal Jewish culture. Her experience before coming to the United States recalls the world inhabited by seventeenth-century New Englanders. Spending her childhood in a small village in northwestern Russia, Cohen had available only “steady sellers” of Judaism—in her case, a few volumes in Hebrew and Yiddish. After her arrival in the United States at the age of twelve, she was immediately sent to work in the garment industry. With the possibilities for formal schooling foreclosed, print became the means to education. “Now,” she recalled, “reading material was not so limited. A flying newspaper in the street, a crumpled advertisement sheet, I would smooth out tenderly and carry off home, happy in the expectation of what was awaiting me” (201). She found her way to Charles Dickens, one of the most popular writers on the Lower East Side. She began to study English, and she began to write. Cohen's Out of the Shadow, which originated as a composition in an advanced English course at the Socialist Rand School, was translated into French, Danish, and Russian.

In contrast to Cohen, Antin had the support of a father, who sent her to the public school instead of the factory and took pride in her achievements. The public school, the Boston Public Library, which Antin described as “my palace,” and the encouragement of teachers set Antin on the road to publication. The Promised Land, an unalloyed celebration of her adoptive country, opened with the declaration “I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over” (209). Antin's tale of Americanization went through thirty-four editions between its publication in 1912 and 1949. In their acts of reading and writing, Cohen and Antin reimagined their lives. Contrasting the prescriptions imposed by religion and family with the greater freedom and gender equality they discovered in the United States, they claimed the latter for themselves. Like the Hamiltons, Addams, and Thomas, it was reading that inspired Cohen and Antin to forge identities and lives that were very much their own.

African American women took a different journey toward selfhood. Instead of dividing generations, as it had for many daughters of Jewish immigrants, literacy operated as a collective enterprise, which African Americans deployed throughout the nineteenth century. Consider Ellen Butler's exposure to reading and writing. In recalling her experience as a slave on a plantation in Louisiana, she described an opportunity that had a double edge: “When the white folks go off they writes on the meal and flour with they fingers. Then they know if us steals meal . . . That the way us larn how to write.” In commanding both forms of literacy, slaves were able to forge the passes that took them to freedom. Freeborn abolitionist Sarah Mapps Douglass situated reading and writing in the service of freedom in strikingly different circumstances. “The cause of the slave [is now] my own,” she declared at a meeting of Philadelphia's Female Literary Association. Determined to mobilize the association's other members, Douglass asked, “Has not this been your experience, my sisters?” Many agreed. She then asked that the texts they chose and the conversations they initiated “be altogether directed to the subject of slavery.” Members initiated their project in oral performance and manuscript composition. Douglass took those conversations and manuscripts into print, publishing articles in William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator.Footnote ⁸

Throughout her life, author and activist Ida B. Wells enacted the same connections between orality, reading, and writing that antebellum African Americans had practiced. Wells recalled that her earliest encounter with print was “reading the newspaper to my father and an admiring group of his friends.” The conversation that ensued alerted her to one of the most vicious obstacles to the achievement of racial justice: “I heard the words Ku Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant” (223). Wells gave recitations and delivered at least one speech at one of Memphis's lyceums. She wrote weekly articles for the Living Way, a religious paper, and she tried her hand at fiction. In her career as a journalist, Wells made her mark in a highly controversial campaign against lynching. She spoke the unspeakable—“Nobody in this section of the country,” Wells declared, “believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women” (236). Her career in the South ended with that statement; her message did not. Wells took her campaign elsewhere, lecturing in the North and in Great Britain and publishing a series of pamphlets. The African American women who participated in the women's club movement adopted the same strategies as Sarah Mapps Douglass. Members of these clubs, which brought together literary interests and socially useful projects, founded libraries and reading rooms. Ellen Butler would have applauded the Women's League of Kansas City—its members offered reading and writing classes to formerly enslaved women. African Americans made tangible the pursuit of literacy as a collective enterprise. Dedicated to the achievement of racial justice, they deployed “Pen and Voice,” as Sicherman titles the chapter, “Ida B. Wells, Race, Literature, and Politics.”

“To read,” as the French literary critic Jean Marie Goulemot has remarked, “is to constitute a meaning, not to reconstitute one.”Footnote ⁹ Nowhere are Goulemot's claim and its implications more fully realized than in Sicherman's reading of those who read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An archival and analytical tour de force, her readings range from the adult Rose Pastor, who commended Alcott for her “excellent teachings” to the fifteen-year-old Jane Addams, who told a friend she had “read and re-read ‘Little Women’ and it never seems to grow old” (25). Seen by some scholars as a disciplinary text that forecloses the ambitions of its heroine and sets her on the road to conventional domesticity, Little Women, as Sicherman shows, offered readers many more expansive possibilities. Relatively privileged readers made the novel a vehicle as they struggled with conflict-ridden issues of personal autonomy and sought alternatives to predictable futures. Indeed, identifying with Little Women as a female Bildungsroman has proved to be the most influential of the many readings, and, as Sicherman shows, it is the reading that, more than any other, explains the novel's long-standing success.

It is also the reading that demonstrates most strikingly Michel de Certeau's proposition. From Simone de Beauvoir to Cynthia Ozick to Ann Petry, readers, especially those who aspired to become writers, have “poached” without hesitation, making Jo March their heroine. De Beauvoir saw herself in Jo: “I identified myself passionately with Jo, the intellectual” (28). Ozick “read ‘Little Women’ a thousand times. Ten thousand.” The obvious exaggeration spoke to the novel's impact: “I am no longer incognito, not even to myself. I am Jo in her ‘vortex’; not Jo exactly but some Jo-of-the-future” (15). That Jo was the writer Ozick became as an adult. Ann Petry, who also became a writer, recalled in similar fashion, “I felt as though I was part of Jo and she was part of me.” And that she was: “She was a would be writer—and so was I” (30). But, as Sicherman notes, there is no single mode of reading Little Women. Instead, the novel has served multiple purposes. Some Jewish immigrant women read the novel at least in part as an instructional manual, which offered access to middle-class life and culture. Others read in the same fashion as de Beauvoir, Ozick, and Petry, taking Alcott the author and her success as their model. The phenomenon continues today. The prominent historian of science, and author of a prize-winning study of scientific practitioners in Elizabethan London, Deborah Harkness was herself a childhood reader of Little Women. In the spring of 2010, her debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, made the New York Times best-seller list. Deborah Harkness now has her own “glory cloak,” a gift from a fellow Alcott reader, like that used by Alcott when she “scribbled” in the attic room of Orchard House. In the desert climate of Los Angeles, where Professor Harkness lives, writes, and teaches, her physical use of the cloak is limited. But its presence in her study suggests the continuing influence of Alcott's work on women readers and writers.