The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature rethinks a key chapter in American literary history. Stacey Margolis challenges the idea that 19th-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne through Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood and, more importantly, could only understand themselves thorugh their public actions. She argues that the social issues that 19th-century novelists analyzed--including race, sexuality, the market, and the law--formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires or intentions, but rather in light of the various and inevitable traces they left on the world.

Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthornes and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers' works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments--including changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law--as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes and unintended consequences--one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.