In 1901, Sarah Orne Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island, a novel about queer kinship. Written a few years into her decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, the novel envisions the saltmarsh as a figure for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others.

Charles Warren Stoddard’s only novel features a protagonist who is an aspiring writer living among the Bohemian artistic circles of nineteenth-century San Francisco—the same circles Stoddard himself inhabited. This Q19 volume includes three of Stoddard’s Hawaiian travel sketches, a critical introduction, and extensive annotations.