Introduction

The introduction justifies why a focus on the British critical reception of select American women writers between the US Civil War and World War I is necessary. I explain how this focus revises certain preconceptions about the national identity of feminist literary criticism and the leading role that women took within transatlanticism. I discuss the culture of reviewing and in particular a way of orienting readers to foreign texts that I call “transatlantic reading.” Periodicals that play a prominent role in the following chapters are introduced, including the Academy, the Athenaeum, the Saturday Review, and the Speaker. I explain the principles of selecting the case studies in the following chapters.