Amazon.com description: Product Description: Sharing Secrets asserts that nineteenth-century American women's short fiction cannot be fully understood outside of its cultural context, since the intimate world of women's relationships constituted an implicit body of knowledge that informed both the stories and their reading by a nineteenth-century female audience. While focusing primarily on white, native-born writers such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, the book incorporates relevant comparisons between middle-class white women's stories and other women's relationship stories such as African-American and working-class women's tales, presenting a way for today's reader to approach these sometimes puzzling works of short fiction.