ABSTRACT
Many writers of fiction have created first-person narrators of the other sex. Some of these writers have advised against the practice. William Dean Howells, after reading Sarah Orne Jewett’s story, “Hallowells’s Pretty Sister,” wrote to the author in friendly admonition: “it appears to me impossible that you should do successfully what you’ve undertaken in it; assume a young man’s character in the supposed narrator … when it comes to casting the whole autobiographical being in a character of the alien sex, the line is drawn distinctly” (Arms and Lohmann 130). Thirty-two years later, Jewett in a letter to Willa Cather praised the portrayal of wife and husband in Cather’s story, “On the Gull’s Road,” but continued: “the lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in a man’s character,—it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade” (Fields 246).
