Hope Leslie

Mary Kelley is Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College. The author of Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America, she has also coauthored The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere. Most recently, she edited The Portable Margaret Fuller. Catharine Maria Sedgwick (December 28, 1789 – July 31, 1867) was one of the most notable female novelists of the early nineteeth century. She wrote works set in the colonial and early American periods, and combined a naturalistic and romantic style with protests against Puritan oppressiveness. Her spirited female characters stood in direct contrast to the traditional roles of women of the period.

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionNotes to IntroductionSelected BibliographyA Note on the TextHope LeslieAuthor's NotesExplanatory Notes

This handsome reprint... makes available after many decades the New Englander's tale of seventeenth-century Puritans and their relations with the indigenous Indian population. (Nineteenth-Century Literature) Develop[s] the connections between patriarchal authority within the Puritan state and its policy of dispossessing and exterminating Indians. The different heritage it envisions explicitly links white women and Indians and elaborates a communal concept of liberty at odds with the individualistic concept which predominated in American culture.  (Legacy) A splendidly conceived edition of Sedgwick's historical romance. (Choice)