Exploring the American wing of double-proposal movement through the novels of Carolyn Hentz, Augusta Evans, Laura J Curtis Bullard, E D E N Southworth, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, this book investigates how each of these writers is constrained by her historical circumstances and how she uses her fiction to critique those circumstances.

By considering two possible marriages between the same set of partners, the double-proposal plot interrogates the role of middle-class women in courtship and in public life as well as the quality of married life and the influence a woman potentially brings to it. Tracey charts the genre's evolution from novels that seek answers within renegotiated marriages to those that challenge the efficacy of marriage itself. Reconstructing some of the cultural circumstances that would have influenced the writing, publishing, and reading of the novels, "Plots and Proposals" examines how changing notions of love and romance both inform and are critiqued by this renegade fiction'.