SOURCE: Koppelman, Susan. “A Preliminary Sketch of the Early History of U.S. Women's Short Stories.” Journal of American Culture 22, no. 2 (summer 1999): 1-6.

In the following essay, Koppelman documents the generally neglected tradition of short fiction written by American women in the nineteenth century.

My uncompleted research over the last 26 years has thus far turned up 839 U.S. women who published at least one volume of short stories between 1827, when Sally Wood published Tales of the Night in Portland, Maine, and mid-1993. My list of women who published at least one story between 1822 and 1993 is more than twice as long—more than 1800 women writers. Many of these women published enough stories to have filled several books, but their stories are, as yet, uncollected. (That is one of the ways that women's work is lost—it is published in ephemeral forms and never put between the covers of a...