ABSTRACT
This chapter considers book reviews as one node in a network of publishers, periodicals, booksellers, and libraries. It discusses the prominence of American books in appealing to the British common reader. It analyzes the review as a genre, and treats the culture of transatlantic reviewing as a special case. Press articles that discuss American women writers as a group are analyzed, and the responses of American women writers including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Edith Wharton to their transatlantic fame are addressed. The holdings of Nottingham’s subscription and public libraries in the 1860s through the 1910s are examined as a case study. The book editions, reviews, summary articles, and library holdings all render tangible the processes of dissemination and canonicity underwent by American women writers in Britain during this time.
