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Dastardly villains are no match for Capitola Black, the audacious heroine at the center of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s 1859 bestseller, The Hidden Hand. Readers so admired this literary tomboy’s pluck that Capitola became a popular baby name for decades and inspired the name of a California town. Yet few readers today are familiar with Southworth, one of the highest-earning authors of her day (to whom Louisa May Alcott even gave a subtle nod in Little Women). Rose Neal, author of a brand new biography on Southworth, joins us this week to discuss the writer who gave 19th-century young women permission to imagine lives free from convention and restraint.

Mentioned in this episode:

E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Story of America’s Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Author by Rose Neal

The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth

The Company of Books bookstore

Retribution by E.D.E.N. Southworth

The Deserted Wife by E.D.E.N. Southworth

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Elizabeth Blackwell

Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

The Saturday Visitor

The National Era

John Greenleaf Whittier

Jane Swisshelm

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

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