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Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature by Beth M. Piatote (review)

a glimpse of Stoddard’s maturation as an author. The samples of “Our Lady Correspondent,” published in the Daily Alta California in the mid1850s, show Stoddard experimenting with personae, setting, and tone and commenting on current events, the trials of urban life, current books, and popular authors. Stoddard’s experiments continue in “Gossip from Gotham,” but they reveal a more confident author and more cohesive, organized structure. While many of her subjects remain the same, politics are more central as she focuses on women’s contributions to the Civil War and criticizes political leaders’ vacillations, proclaiming that the country suffers from an “epidemic of imbecility” (88). Some of the most striking moments in Stoddard’s columns and private letters are those in which she reflects on authorship; in these moments her tone, word choice, and figurative language represent Stoddard’s writing at its finest. For instance, in a letter to Edmund Clarence Stedman she compares the writing process to labor, saying her ideas “present themselves, to speak obstetrically, head & feet together” (54). Stoddard labored, too, for recognition— and it was a stillborn attempt. The letters from the last two decades of her life provide a retrospective of a career cursed by bad timing and worse luck. Stoddard rankled at her marginalized position, asserting, “I could laugh bitterly when I think of how I have been ignored, how often in the presence of those who have been lionized who I knew were not my superiors I have been passed over and unnoticed” (205). Ironically, many of the lionized, including her husband, have fallen out of critical favor. Meanwhile, Stoddard has begun to take her place among the lions, as William Dean Howells predicted in 1895. He prophesied that recognition “will be hers when Time begins to look about him for work worth remembering” (qtd. in Putzi and Stockton 224). Selected Letters shows Stoddard’s Time has come.