As scholars of epistolarity have recently argued, letters provide more than just a biographical narrative; they also should be understood as aesthetic performances themselves. The correspondence provides a sense of Stoddard as someone who understood letter writing as a distinct and important literary genre, making this collection particularly well suited for new conceptualizations of the epistolary genre. 

Jennifer Putzi is an associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2006) and the editor of Elizabeth Stoddard’s second novel, Two Men (2008), originally published in 1865. Elizabeth Stockton is an assistant professor of English at Southwestern University. Her work, which primarily focuses on law and literature in antebellum America, has appeared in The New England Quarterly and African American Review.