“Passionnément was what I wanted”: Female Sexuality in Grace King’s and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Fiction

Salenius examines the ways in which two Southern writers, Grace King and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, introduced women’s sexuality in their short stories. They rendered female passion and same-gender attraction more acceptable to conventional readers by embedding their progressive messages of sexual politics in seemingly traditional sentimental stories. Hence, their fiction challenged dominant conceptualizations of womanhood and reacted against female oppression and heteronormativity.