Fictional Females: Mirrors and Models

About the Book

Fictional Females is a book about books--specifically, about more than 160 American novels that had female protagonists, appeared between the immediate post-Revolutionary period and the beginning of World War II, and shaped as well as reflected women´s lives. All 80 authors, both men and women, were bestsellers and/or critically acclaimed in their time, and their fiction provides a record of how successive generations of women accepted or challenged the conventions of their day and enjoyed the rewards or suffered the consequences of either choice. Today, an examination of those novels and the historical context in which they appeared illuminates the changing conscious and unconscious assumptions about the nature of woman--of what she is, what she wants, and what she gets--over the years.

About the Author

An editor, author, and translator, Eleanor Hochman has a graduate degree in Comparative Literature and worked for many years at a major publishing house. Her translations from the French include George Sand's feminist classic, Indiana; Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers; and Claude-Edmonde Magny's The Age of the American Novel, a pioneering study of the relationship between film and fiction. In collaboration with her husband, she also translated Emile Zola's Germinal; co-authored a reference book, A Dictionary of Contemporary American History; and published (under pseudonyms) several romance novels--a homage to her fascination with popular fiction.