Ammons argues that the long fiction by American women from the early 1890s until the late 1920s forms a diverse yet unified body of work. Her aim is to pull together the work of writers who were contemporaries but who, in criticism, are almost always treated independently. The project identifies the turn of the century as a remarkable period of artistic achievement for women, and restructures the American literary past by uniting women writers of this era.

The writers dealt with include: F. E. W. Harper, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Pauline Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Summers Kelly.