Last fall, I wrote about women writers whose work has fallen into obscurity and out of print for the Los Angeles Review of Books: Ghosts on the Page: Alice Cary’s Hagar: A Story of To-Day and Other Lost Books.

I recently discovered a phenomenal website, NeglectedBooks.com. Lucy Scholes mentions the website in her piece about forgotten writer Frances Bellerby, “More Pain Than Anyone Should Be Expected to Bear.” Scholes writes the “Re-Covered” column for The Paris Review about “out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.”

I searched the Neglected Books website and didn’t find Hagar there, so I wrote to the editor to alert him to another lost book he might be interested in reading. He did an excellent deeper dive into Hagar and the other books I mention and discovered an entire sub-genre of 19th Century literature: the Hagar novel.

The Neglected Books editor generously titled the piece “Leanne Phillips on Alice Cary’s ‘Hagar: A Story of To-Day’ and Other Lost Books,” but his piece actually builds substantially on mine. He found some fascinating information about Hagar and the other books I mention. He also uncovered other noteworthy Hagar novels from the same time period.