Abstract
The gendered rhetorical constraints imposed on female writers in mid-nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals are challenged by the representations of letter writing in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, popular mid-century novels. By investigating imaginative literature by women as a site of women’s rhetoric, feminist historians of rhetoric can recognize that the battlefield for expanding women’s rhetorical agency in the mid-nineteenth century is not primarily located at the division between domestic and public realms—the site emphasized in current histories of women’s rhetoric—but is interior, where letter-writing rhetorics seek to police habits of mind.