ABSTRACT

Imagine finishing an American pamphlet novel – say, The Land Pirate, or The Wild Girl of the Beach – in 1847. The sensational plot has left you hungry for more and conveniently, there at the back of the book, the publishers include a catalogue of other stories ‘Just Published!’ for you to peruse. Readers eager for more pirate lore may be tempted by The Witch of the Wave and The Sea Serpent; or, Queen of the Coral Cave, while those dreaming of frontier adventure may look for Corilia, or the Indian Enchantress; A Romance of the Pacific or The Trapper’s Daughter, A Tale of Oregon.1 As these titles suggest, intrepid, cross-dressing heroines, largely forgotten today, were a common feature of American popular fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century. On one hand, as Henry Nash Smith argues in his classic study Virgin Land, these heroines, who appeared in the mid-1840s and became increasingly common from that time through the 1870s, were in some ways products of their harsh, new-world environment.2 On the other hand, the creators of these figures are likely to have drawn inspiration from a rich European popular tradition, which includes not only familiar characters from Shakespeare and Defoe, but also numerous narratives of cross-dressed women working as sailors or soldiers in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.