Along the way Capitola meets with long-lost relatives and dastardly villains. She is taken in by a rich relative and then the plot thickens. When we first meet her, Capitola is dressed as a boy to get employment – boys can work, girls can’t. She is an orphan and is quite possibly the feistiest heroine in American literature. The heroine of The Hidden Hand is Capitola. Of her many books one of them, The Hidden Hand is still in print and still very enjoyable as an example of old-fashioned melodramatic storytelling at its best. One thing that is sure – she was a bestseller. Her books were serialized in story-papers and later printed and re-printed under different titles to the point that scholars are not quite sure how many books she did write. Southworth was a very popular writer in the middle to latter part of the 19th century. This book features a character who was wildly popular and is the prototype of all of today’s feisty, risk taking, plain speaking heroines. In addition to these wonderful British ladies, I would like to propose a work by a 19th century American woman writer. Romance readers look to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte as writers whose books were ancestors to today’s modern romance novels.
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