Review of \u3ci\u3eKate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist\u3c/i\u3e by Gary Scharnhorst and \u3ci\u3eMaria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics\u3c/i\u3e by Renée Bergland.

Literary historians writing biographies have increasingly shifted from critical biography (the author’s life as a means to interpret his or her literary works) to cultural biography (an author’s life and works in various cultural contexts). As literary historians whose biographical subjects (both nineteenth-century American women) are not primarily literary figures, Bergland and Scharnhorst represent a further step away from critical biography