The American Women's Dime Novel Project

Dime novels were the predecessors of the pulps, bringing cheap fiction to a mass audience of all age groups. They published stories in many genres - western, crime/detective, sports, horror, science fiction and romance being some.

Assorted dime novels (image courtesy Skinner Auctions)

I read a few, and it may have been my luck, but I didn't find them gripping. I never paid much attention to any critical reviews of them after that, but this website has gone some distance in changing my mind about them.

An introduction to the website itself:

This web site grew out my research for my dissertation entitled “All For Love: Gender and Class and the Woman’s Dime Novel in Nineteenth-Century America” which examines the genre of women’s dime novel writing and its role in changing gender and class formations. While other forms of nineteenth-century women’s writing have been the focus of extensive scholarship and have developed a strong presence on the web, it became clear to me that dime novels have not received the attention they deserve. This genre, once enormously popular with its readers, has been neglected for most of its history by scholars, collectors, and libraries. It suffers from the double burden of being both popular and written for working-class women. This project hopes to overcome the history of oversight to both the form and its readers by providing information about the novels themselves, the authors, the readers, and nineteenth century public reaction.

It has a great essay on the American women's dime novel, links to e-books of dime novels available for free, articles about a few authors and publishers (including Street and Smith).