Date of this Version
E.D.E.N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist (University of Tennessee, 2012).
Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under a single title into separately titled volumes; even more confusingly, he sometimes retitled these novels yet again in later editions without referencing the former titles. Organizing our bibliography chronologically by first publication (which is most often, but not always, periodical publication), we make an accurate count of the number of novels she wrote possible. Although this number-just under fifty-is lower than others' estimates and does not include her short fiction, it is still substantial, representing more than a novel a year during the four decades Southworth actively wrote fiction.