Christine
A feminist novel that has been called "the Jane Eyre of women's rights fiction," and yet was not reprinted until recently. It explicitly parallels the bondage of women and of slaves, as well as the movements of feminism and abolitionism, with a rare frankness for popular fiction its day. The author wound up acquiring Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's trailblazing feminist periodical Revolution. When Laura Curtis Bullard wrote the novel Christine in 1856, she created one of antebellum America's most radical heroines: a woman's rights leader. Addressing the major social, political, and cultural issues surrounding women from within an unusually overt feminist framework for its time, Christine openly challenges a social and legal system that denies women full and equal rights.