Mollie Barnes, "Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838-1902" (U South Carolina Press, 2026)

About this episode

Dr. Mollie Barnes discusses her book on women writers in the Sea Islands and their complex narratives during the 19th century.

In Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838-1902 (U South Carolina Press, 2026), Dr. Mollie Barnes studies the ways women represented their own and one another's lives in their personal diaries and their biographies of their contemporaries. By reading these women writers—Black and white, obscure and well-known—in conversation, Dr. Barnes presents entirely new portraits of these freedom fighters of the nineteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry. Like feminist and anti-racist leaders in our own moment, the women in Paper Heroines were often flawed. White women reformers sometimes created tensions, silences, revisions, and erasures within their print-culture networks, obscuring the lives and contributions of Black women. Black women developed counternarratives and counter-networks as they sought to reclaim their own life histories. What emerges from Barnes's exploration of these textual conversations is a story of complicated relationships that reveal the dynamism of women's lives in a place and time that was equally tumultuous and consequential. Key terms and names is this episode include: close reading, archival silences, the…

People in this episode

Guest: Dr. Mollie Barnes

Topics covered

• women writers
• 19th century
• South Carolina
• Black women
• feminism
• anti-racism
• life writing

Keywords

• Paper Heroines
• women writers
• diaries
• biographies
• freedom fighters
• counternarratives
• print-culture
• archival silences

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: U South Carolina Press

Places: South Carolina Lowcountry, The Penn School, Port Royal, Beaufort, Combahee River, St. Helena

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