It is difficult to disengage a single thread from the living web of a nation’s literature. The interplay of influences is such, that the product spun from the heart and brain of woman alone must, when thus disengaged, lose something of its significance. In criticism, a classification based upon sex is necessarily misleading and inexact. As far as difference between the literary work of women and that of men is created by difference of environment and training, it may be regarded as accidental; while the really essential difference, resulting from the general law that the work of woman shall somehow, subtly, express womanhood, not only varies widely in degree with the individual worker, but is, in certain lines of production, almost ungraspable by criticism. We cannot rear walls which shall separate literature into departments, upon a principle elusive as the air. “It is no more the order of nature that the especially feminine element should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy should exist unmingled with it in any form.” The experiment which, Lowell tells us, Nature tried in shaping the genius of Hawthorne, she repeats and reverses at will. In practice, the evil effects which have followed the separate consideration of woman’s work in literature are sufficiently plain. The debasement of the coin of criticism is a fatal measure. The dearest foe of the woman artist in the past has been the suave and chivalrous critic, who, judging all “female writers” by a special standard, has easily bestowed the unearned wreath. The present paper is grounded, it will be seen, upon no preference for the Shaker-meeting arrangement which prevailed so long in our American Temple of the Muses. It has seemed desirable, in a historical review of the work of women in this country, to follow the course of their effort in the field of literature; to note the occasional impediments of the stream, its sudden accessions of force, its general tendency, and its gradual widening. The colonial period has of course little to give us. The professional literary woman was then unknown. The verses of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, called in flattery “the tenth Muse,” were “the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.” The negro girl, Phillis Wheatley, whose poetical efforts had been published under aristocratic patronage in England, when robbed of her mistress by death “resorted to marriage”—not to literature—“as the only alternative native of destitution.” Mrs. Mercy Warren was never obliged to seek support from that sharp-pointed pen which copied so cleverly the satiric style of Pope, and which has left voluminous records of the Revolution. She too wrote her tragedies “for amusement, in the solitary hours when her friends were abroad.”