The Authors' Club of Lousville

Oh hey! I wrote another guest blog post about female literary friendship, this one about the Authors' Club of Louisville, a small writers' group in Louisville in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that boasted three best-selling authors. The members pooled not only their writing skills but also their knowledge of the markets, which I think is why they found such success: they married their devotion to their craft with business acumen.

While I was researching this post, I found an incident that I didn't have room to fit into the blog post: sometime in the 1910s one of Rice's friends couldn't find a publisher for a story with woman suffrage themes, and Rice wrote a note consoling her: "You can’t tell, of course, what reader may be prejudiced against suffrage, - it breaks out in such funny places - but I am sure that story has its public."

And it struck me (this sounds less exciting now that I'm typing it out) that literary history at the end of the day is the story of what publishers were willing to print - that if we find it hard to find stories with suffrage themes (for example) we ought to keep in mind that it may be because publishers didn't want to publish it, not because no one was writing it.