Sophia Peabody Hawthorne has garnered significant critical interest in the past decade and a half, signaled most recently by the 2009 MLA session, "The Two-Hundredth Anniversary of Sophia Hawthorne." New biographies of Peabody Hawthorne--Patricia Valenti's 2004 _Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 1, 1809-1847_ and Megan Marshall's group biography of Sophia and her sisters, _The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism_, 2005--have been joined by the first collection of critical essays devoted to Peabody Hawthorne and her famous sisters, _Reinventing the Peabody Sisters_, 2006. All of these endeavors have refocused attention on Hawthorne as intellectual, artist, writer, and collaborator, rather than as chief helpmate to a talented husband.
The _Nathaniel Hawthorne Review_ seeks to augment and extend these critical conversations with a special issue devoted to Sophia Hawthorne, to be published in fall 2011. Novel treatments of any aspect of Hawthorne's cultural work--art, writing (both public and private), collaborative enterprises--are welcome. Please send manuscripts directly to the guest editor, Julie Hall, at eng_jeh@shsu.edu. Deadline for detailed proposals (500-800 words) is August 1, 2010. Deadline for submission of final manuscripts of 5000-7000 words is January 30, 2011. Queries are welcome.