Victoria Brehm makes us look deeper into Woolson’s prose and motivations in order to uncover her profound concern with national events, international politics, and the ambiguities of social and political leaders. Brehm pierces through the self-protective screens that Woolson often used to mask these issues by analyzing seemingly minute references and by uncovering a complex underbody of satire, allegory, and yes, anger at a world that denies women rights. Particularly strong readings of "For the Major" and Horace Chase impress, but shorter works, we find, underneath romantic surfaces, also provide sharp takes on the gold standard, industrialization, and the corruptions of the gilded age. Well researched, and eloquently written, this study gives us unsuspected and rewarding apertures into a great artist’s ideological concerns and methods.
— John Wharton Lowe, University of Georgia
For decades, scholars have engaged in the careful work of exposing the depths beneath the surfaces of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s texts – pulling a thread here and another there. Dr. Brehm’s book progresses that work further than any Woolson scholarship to date. Her grasp of nineteenth-century politics and culture allows her to reveal a rich informed view of Woolson’s engagement with postbellum American society. Best yet, Brehm reveals resonances between the deeply politically polarized postbellum America and the equally polarized America of our own time. She makes an irresistible case for Woolson’s relevance to America today while simultaneously grounding her texts in post-Civil War America.
— Jacqueline Justice, Bowling Green State University-Firelands College
Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Subversive Politics is the most recent of Victoria Brehm’s extensive contributions to the study of Great Lakes Literature and history. Brehm has authored articles and edited important anthologies – collections that rescue many nearly forgotten Great Lakes texts, making these works widely available to readers and scholars. In Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Subversive Politics, Brehm’s focus is on the works of Great Lakes author Constance Fenimore Woolson. One of the challenges of reading Woolson’s work is understanding the layering of references to issues, people, and concerns of post-Civil war America… While Woolson’s contemporaries could be expected to recognize many of the hints and clues woven into her texts, today’s readers may miss out on the richness of what Woolson’s texts reveal about 19th Century politics and culture. Essentially, Brehm decodes some Woolson’s texts for a new generation of readers, including Great Lake stories like “The Lady of Little Fishing,” “Castle Nowhere,” and “Mission Endeavor.” Even readers who may have studied Woolson’s texts before will find themselves eager to re-read with the new lens Brehm provides- a lens that reveals surprising similarities between the politically polarized postbellum America and America in our own time.
— Inland Seas