Authors, Wives, Slaves: Coverture, Copyright, and Authorial Dispossession, 1831–1869

TL;DRAbstract

In Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune's novel Phemie's Temptation (serialized in 1868 in Godey's Lady's Book under the less provocative title of Phemie Rowland, published in book form in 1869, and published in both instances under her long-time pseudonym “Marion Harland”), the intersection of two forms of property law, the law of coverture and the law of copyright, drives the novel's plot. The eponymous heroine's bankrupt husband, James Hart, abandons her, and in order to support herself and her daughter, she resumes the career as an author she had abandoned when she married. As she begins to put a new life together for herself, Phemie faces the intersection between her legal disabilities under the common law doctrine of coverture and her literary proprietorship in an extreme form. Not only is James Hart her husband, he is also her publisher. Early in her marriage, without her husband's prior knowledge or consent, she publishes a novel under the pseudonym “Epsilon,” hoping he will be pleased

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