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Authors
Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1851)
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Mary Kelley’s 1987 edition of Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1987) helped to stimulate new interest in Sedgwick. Other paperback editions of Sedgwick’s novels include A New-England Tale; or, Sketches of New England Character and Manners (1995), edited by Victoria Clements, and The Linwoods (2002), edited by Maria Karafilis. Mary E. Dewey’s essential Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1871) should be reprinted; it may be supplemented by The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1993), edited by Mary Kelley. Christopher Castiglia’s Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (1996) and Philip Gould’s Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism (1996) have excellent discussions of Hope Leslie. See also Lucinda L. Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements’s edited collection, Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives (2003).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
As one of our earliest successful writers about small-town American life, Sedgwick stands at the head of a long tradition – a tradition that we need to think about carefully if we are to understand its intentions and effects. In Sedgwick’s lifetime, publishing was scattered over the national landscape, not centered in major cities, as was true from about 1860 onward.
1. When a story published in New York or Chicago, or filmed in Hollywood, represents small-town life, what audience expectations can be triggered by that place of origin? What are your impressions: do Sedgwick’s narratives show us compassion and understanding from the inside or condescension from without? What modern stories, films, or television series about small-town American life can you think of, and what would you describe as the attitude of each toward its respective subject?
2. With millions of sites and pages uploaded into cyberspace every week, are we seeing an end to metropolitan control over the mythology of small-town life? Are American towns now in a position to tell their own stories in their own way? Or are there other media forces at work out there, that we need to consider before we reach that conclusion?
