Anne (novel)

It depicts the emotional and spiritual conflicts faced by its eponymous heroine as she leaves her home village, Mackinac Island, to seek a future as a young woman in the Northeastern United States.

Her good qualities win her many suitors, but she finds hypocrisy and dysfunctional social relationships among the wealthier strata of U.S. Victorian society.

Eventually she selects a suitor who, although of wealthy origins, has lost his means and is ready to accept the stolid virtues of the American working class.

Among the earliest to recognize Woolson's talent was critic Horace Scudder, who anticipated she would eventually be elevated into the American literary canon alongside great writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

His review of Anne in The Atlantic Monthly, however, noted the "immaturity of the book" and predicted it would be remembered "chiefly as a marking stage in the author's development".