Elsa Nettels's analysis of American fiction and criticism of the post-Civil War era unearths the prevailing assumptions about language and gender as revealed in definitions of masculine and feminine, and in comparisons of men's and women's speech and writing. Chapters on William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Utopian fiction show how individual writers both reinforced and subverted gender ideology in their treatment of language and social class and in their construction of dialogue and the discourse of first and third person narrators.