These unpublished stories present an opportunity to question the distinction between work written by American women and the work published by American women, and to affirm the necessity for scholars to return to the archives, and the margins of history, in order to reread what might still be missing from narratives of literary history.

Stevenson's published stories appeared in Belgravia, St. Nicholas, Scribner’s, Lippincott’s, and McClure’s among others––popular and successful magazines edited by and featuring some of the most celebrated American (and British) authors of the era. Belgravia was extremely influential within British culture in particular, as a channel for sensation fiction. The magazine was founded in 1866 by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and other widely known texts, and her magazine published authors such as Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Lippincott’s circulated stories by many of the same authors, publishing Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four in February 1890, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray five months later. Regular Scribner’s contributors varied from Stevenson’s husband Louis to Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wharton and Hemingway were even, for a time, employed as Scribner’s staff writers. McClure’s, known for its more overtly political focus, boasted Willa Cather as a writer and managing editor. Stevenson’s stories were published alongside these famous names and many more, a fact which emphasises the need to include her within critical studies of late nineteenth century writing.^[1]

The tales Stevenson published in magazines specifically for children also shared space with distinguished writers. St. Nicholas, one such magazine for young people, featured writing by Twain, Kipling, Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and others. Several children’s classics, such as The Jungle Book (1894) and A Little Princess (1905), began as serials in St. Nicholas. The magazine was exceptionally popular, and one aspect which has attracted critical attention from scholars of the periodical press was the “St. Nicholas League,” a monthly competition for readers’ submissions of writing or art whose prizes included cash. Edna St. Vincent Millay won seven poetry awards from St. Nicholas, although both F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner were only awarded honourable mentions. Such details suggest the salience of children’s magazines within literary history: St. Nicholas was inspiring, informing––and in this case funding––the next generation of storytellers.

Thus, not only was Stevenson publishing in successful journals for adults, but the magazines for children within which she published were extraordinarily popular as well. Both Elaine Showalter and Michael Newton have argued for greater recognition of children’s fiction and fantasy writing in the nineteenth century, not only because these genres impacted children themselves, but also because such texts were often, more surreptitiously than other modes, vehicles of subversive content for adult readers. In reading, as well as writing, fairy tales or tales of wonder, Newton affirms, “adults dramatize their own wants and dreams, and simultaneously dream themselves back into their own childhood.” Newton further attests to the literary value of fantasy writing, which often provides children with their “first discover[ies] of intertextuality”; the tales are “known, and loved, and mockable, and quickly understood as working in generic terms, according to accepted rules.” In the late nineteenth century United States, women such as Stevenson were manipulating these accepted rules for the purposes of social commentary, by writing dreams and fables which “acknowledged the bitter disappointments of personal life and literary ambition.” In this way, “hiding subversive material in the category of children’s literature was one way to escape censure.”^[2]

As a woman who moved in the circles of well-known authors and artists, and lived in a number of different regions, Stevenson’s texts offer the opportunity to do two things: they furnish additional perspectives through which to understand established literary-critical conventions, and they also inform understandings of wider print culture. In the 1850s and 1860s, the two decades immediately preceding the point when Stevenson began to publish her work, the domestic novel was the most popular form of American fiction, and this genre’s stylish writing has been tied to the so-called cult of domestic womanhood.^[3] The trappings of domesticity are found throughout Stevenson’s work in her depictions of flora, landscape tableaux, and the more ornamental aspects of the natural environment. As women writers found success through such texts and began to further assert their literary influence, the postbellum era of change and political upheaval led to the new heroine of women’s writing in the 1870s, the early emergence of the New Woman figure, emancipated and forward thinking as she was imagined to be. Themes of both progressivism and domesticity thus resonate with Stevenson’s stories’ consistent renegotiation of social and subjective constructions of femininity.

In other ways, Stevenson’s stories incorporate aspects of the local colour tale, an entanglement between regional fiction and the flourishing midcentury short story which also drew from early journalistic accounts of areas of the United States which were rapidly urbanising. Well-known local colour writers include Caroline Kirkland, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Helen Hunt Jackson, and others who interrogated the kinds of changes in understandings of domesticity through their understandings of specific regional attitudes.

These unconventional qualities are what makes her writing so valuable and worthwhile to include in the canon of nineteenth century American women’s writing: her fiction forcefully tests the limits of models and theories of that oeuvre.

Stevenson’s stories often participate in a similar kind of subversive discourse. Her tales figure such resistance to social conventions through fantastic and uncanny phenomena such as talking dogs, ghosts, wood nymphs, and warlocks, but as in other women’s writing, these supernatural or childish fantasies stand in for very real concerns. Incorporating book historical and print cultural readings of texts like Stevenson's (and her contemporaries') into literary histories can aid in the rediscovery of those narratives which have been hiding in plain sight.