Dinah Maria Mulock Craik was born on April 20, 1826 in Stoke-on-Trent, England. The daughter of a school teacher and Primitive Methodist preacher, Craik was fortunate to receive an education at the Brampton House Academy, a day school near her home in Newcastle-under-Lyme.  Although her family was middle class, Craik reached out to family members and booksellers to gain access to books by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott and took interest in reading. At the age of 19, her mother died, and quickly thereafter, her father abandoned her and her two brothers, leaving Craik to fend for themselves financially. And so, Craik took up writing to make money. Her brothers died soon after.

However, Craik did not take up authorship as a profession simply out of necessity.  In fact, she writes in A Woman’s Thoughts About Women that she chose to become a writer because it was the only profession where women competed with men “on a level ground — and . . . often beat them in their own field” (Chapter 3).

Originally published in London in 1858 during the Victorian era, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women is a self-help book written by female author Dinah Maria Mulock Craik. She discusses various aspects of life for middle class British women, ranging from education and self-dependence to female friendships and growing old. 

Our specific copy of the book is not an initial copy published in London, but rather an American edition that was published by Follett, Foster & Company in 1858 in Columbus, Ohio. The introduction to this book is written by Reverend Anson Smyth, who was an Ohio State School Commissioner. The introduction conveys Rev. Smyth’s negative opinions towards American women of the mid-19th century and his belief that they are lazy and should read Craik's book in order to improve their character, work ethic, and overall demeanor.

Upon discovering that this copy is actually intended for an American audience, our group questioned why this introduction was written by a religious man for an American audience compared to the original British copy that had no introduction. We generated questions to think about in terms of gender critique, such as if there needed to be an introduction written by a man to assert some validity for Craik as a female author to an American audience. If Craik didn’t need an introduction in her book by a man to be heavily circulated and read in London, why was there an introduction included in the U.S. version? 

We raise more questions like these ones within our research that call attention to the power of Craik’s work to assert its own value and validity. We think this aspect of continual questioning is significant when thinking about our anthology project as a whole and how we as a class seek to recover works by feminine authors in order to depict how their work contributes to feminist recovery and gender critique.

Overall, our anthology project is grounded in and guided by questions. We decided to include questions within each section of our anthology entry because we intend to display to readers how our group conducted research, and to convey the inquisitiveness within us as researchers and how our anthology project as a whole questions the traditional female literature canon. 

Our initial questions seek to kick-start our continued research process as we navigate through our findings. The primary and secondary sources that we gathered provide us with more insight into Craik’s identity and the diverse intersectional influences that contributed to the production of this particular work. We think about this research process as a web that continues to grow as sources overlap, lead to one another, and inspire future findings. 

We want readers to know that our group and other groups within our class do not have all the answers. We will never have them all because we continue to learn and aggregate sources that expand our knowledge and understandings of authors, their texts, and the periods of time in which they lived. There is no stopping place for our research, but that is the beauty of this anthology creation process. We are challenged to ask more questions as we seek answers. As we are learning and questioning and growing through research, we continue to bring new voices to the forefront that have not been included within the traditional literary canon. We connect with other groups in order to inspire more questions about authorship, identity, patriarchal influences, etc. In all of these ways, we continue to inspire more inquiry and critique of the traditional literary canon. We want to question the means and decisions for inclusion of authors and their work in anthologies, and then shape an “anti-anthology” that reshapes and rethinks tradition to bring new voices, identities, and dynamics beyond what readers may be used to or familiar with within a Westernized, white, heterosexual, and male-dominated society.