Not In Sisterhood investigates an important transitional moment in the history of U.S. women's writing : the uneasy shift from the 19th-century model of the "lady author" to some new but undefined alternative. The careers of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, together with that of their friend and peer Zona Gale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, reveal several different strategies for negotiating this unknown terrain. While Gale made her feminist politics an integral part of her successful novels and plays, Wharton and Cather publicly denied any interest in gender issues or social reforms. Not in Sisterhood shows how the complex intersections of literary and social politics that shaped the world of Wharton, Cather, and Gale are still at work in today's feminist reconstructions of literary history.

DEBORAH LINDSAY WILLIAMS is Associate Professor of English at Iona College in New York, where she teaches U.S. literature and Women's Studies.

Women Who Did Things Openly: Zona Gale's Utopian Visions Threatening Correspondences: The Gale-Cather-Wharton Letters Robbing the Alphabet: Feminism on the Margins Women at War: Writing about World War I Making History