This essay will argue that in some cases-most notably her best-known work The Hidden Hand-Southworth may have been too successful in her efforts, creating work that can today be read as abolitionist only with difficulty. Specifically, I will argue that this discrepancy is caused by Southworth's attempt to shape a fiction that, by incorporating aspects of plantation fiction and omitting overt attacks upon slavery, might appear palatable to southern readers while still maintaining an abolitionist argument. This essay will attempt to account for the discrepancy in Southworth's strong anti-slavery opinions and her reputation in the twentieth century as an apologist for the institution. Ironically, when Southworth's work is mentioned at all in the literary histories of the twentieth century, it is often as an example of plantation fiction, that genre of novels developed by the antebellum South as a defense of slavery-an institution that Southworth abhorred. Probably no issue was of more concern for Southworth than slavery many of her early works are overtly abolitionist novels arguing for the dismantlement of the slave system in the South. In some sense, The Hidden Hand should be seen as an anomaly among Southworth's works, many of which assume explicit positions on issues of the author's day. A major reason for this difficulty is that The Hidden Hand, the novel for which Southworth has been best known in the twentieth century, certainly seems apolitical-a comic novel full of sensational twists, melodramatic reunions, and stereotypical supporting characters and lacking the ardent polemics and authorial addresses of the more typical political novels of the 1850s.

Southworth (1819-1899) have often been difficult for contemporary scholars to observe. The political commitments of nineteenth-century novelist E.

The hidden hand southworth