The concepts and practices associated with privacy, property, and belonging – and thus with national identity – frame Katherine Adams's discussion of women's life writing from 1840 to 1890. Adams considers the political culture of these decades in terms of antebellum and postbellum understandings of privacy and identity formations; and to do this, each chapter analyzes women's biographical, autobiographical, and autobiographical fiction texts in the context of US privacy discourses and critiques.

The introduction, “Imperiled Privacy,” carefully explains how the key term of “self-(non)possession” is used throughout Owning Up to suggest the contradictions that blend, but rarely stabilize, into articulations of self-identity. Each narrative takes up, or takes place against, pivotal events in the US. These most prominently include the end of slavery, the post-Civil War market economy, and new labor ideologies and demographics; newly aligned gender and race relations; and formations of a national citizenry based on what Adams explains as “two antagonistic and simultaneous conditions – we are owned, we are not owned – and of incessantly rehearsing the drama between them” (203). The idea of self-(non)possession acknowledges the deep tensions produced by these national changes: “On one side, self-(non)possession strains toward a horizon of seamless self-unity and the perfect freedom of disembedded autonomy. On the other side, self-(non)possession defends against the opposite extreme: a self so unmediated that it lacks self-mastery, self-consciousness, or any self-relation at all” (13). Though it is useful, Adams's terminology may strike some readers as awkward, and explanations such as “self-(non)possession is not non-self possession” may add to the awkwardness. But on the whole, the book establishes its purpose and adheres to its methodology in analyzing selected life-writing texts by Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckley, and Louisa May Alcott. Throughout these chapters, self-(non)possession is perhaps most effective in exhibiting how the authors are alert to their texts' limitations and contradictions, and how they manipulate these elements while in the process they also reinscribe them.

All the chapters focus on nineteenth-century women's life-writing strategies for incorporating privacy discourses that sometimes promote nostalgic utopianism and other times envision progressive ideas of democratic freedom and political economy. Attempting this, Fuller, Stowe, Keckley, and Alcott are preoccupied with varying degrees of freedom and conditions of possession as well as the dynamics of ownership, privilege, and privation based on the racialized assumptions of the female body, especially the female black body. Chapter 2 studies embodiment, possession, and reform in Margaret Fuller's unfinished autobiography and in autobiographical elements in Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Chapter 3 focusses on ideas of embodied excess and black privation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and her essay “Sojourner Truth: The Libyan Sibyl.” Chapter 4, on Elizabeth Keckley's autobiography Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, takes issue with previous studies that criticize Keckley for shifting her autobiography as a freed slave who formed her own business and became Mary Todd Lincoln's designer and seamstress into a biographical account of Lincoln's notorious “old clothes scandal.” It is a narrative of colliding privacies and properties, national symbols and individual assets – and the female black body in the contexts of bondage and freedom as laborer and creator, artisan and artist. As Adams demonstrates, “By extension, she [Keckley] will reveal the racialist, material basis of white democratic freedom and portend the full national significance of black economic freedom” (146). And finally, chapter 5 traces Louisa May Alcott's evolving ideas of how race and gender affect relations involving privacy, property, and social justice, primarily in Little Men: Life at Plumfield, and Jo's Boys.

Owning Up is a nuanced, historical, literary study that examines women's life writing for what it reveals of middle-class domesticity and ideas of nineteenth-century reform, with interventions of race and emerging forms of authority. The study recognizes that life writing often has less to do with genre distinctions than with forms of strategy to meet public expectations about private experience and autobiographical conventions to challenge widely held social beliefs. Adams is quick to emphasize the authors' complicated status involving limited freedoms as well as forms of privilege, illustrating how that status, in each life and each text, offers another dimension in the process of authors “owning up” to the complexities of nineteenth-century formations of national practices and ideologies of citizenship and community.