A teenage orphan from Vermont, Mary Gibson burst onto the literary scene during the
early 1850s as a star writer, under the pseudonym Winnie Woodfern, for more than half a
dozen Boston “story papers,” mass-circulation weekly periodicals that specialized in popular
fiction. Although she would soon join such famous woman authors as Fanny Fern
and E. D. E. N. Southworth as featured contributors to the New York Ledger, America’s
greatest story paper, Gibson’s subsequent output rarely matched the gender-bending creativity
of the tales written in her late teens and early twenties and reprinted in this volume.

But “Hero Strong” and Other Stories does much more than recover the work of a
forgotten literary prodigy. As explained by historian Daniel A. Cohen, Gibson’s tales
also illuminate major interrelated transformations in American girlhood and American
women’s authorship. Challenging traditional gender expectations, thousands of girls of
Gibson’s generation not only aspired to public careers as writers, artists, educators, and
even doctors but also began to experiment with new forms of “female masculinity” in
attitude, bearing, behavior, dress, and sexuality—a pattern only gradually domesticated
by the nonthreatening image of the “tomboy.” Some, such as Gibson, at once realized and
reenacted their dreams on the pages of antebellum story papers.

This first modern scholarly edition of Mary Gibson’s early fiction features ten tales of
teenage girls (seemingly much like Gibson herself) who fearlessly appropriate masculine
traits, defy contemporary gender norms, and struggle to fulfill high worldly ambitions.
In addition to several heroines who seek “fame and riches” as authors or artists,
Gibson’s unconventional protagonists include three female medical students who resort to
grave robbing and a Boston ingénue who dreams of achieving military glory in battle. By
moving beyond “literary domesticity” and embracing bold new models of women’s
authorship, artistry, and worldly achievement, Gibson and her fictional protagonists stand
as exemplars of “the first generation of American girls who imagined they could do almost
anything.”

Daniel A. Cohen is an associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University.
His previous publications include Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime
Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 and ‘The Female Marine’
and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and Urban Vice in America’s Early
Republic.

The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.

Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
 
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
 
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.