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  • "I Trust Every Feeling Heart":Reader History and P. D. Manvill's Lucinda; Or The Mountain Mourner
  • Mischelle Booher (bio)

At the Sage Colleges Library in Troy, New York, lies a small nondescript book called Lucinda; Or The Mountain Mourner, by "Mrs. P. D. Manvill." Sewn onto the inside front cover is a memento surviving nearly two centuries: two samples of human hair, one knotted and the other crocheted into a bracelet, encircle a pair of initials—though faded, they appear to be "CB" and "JMc" (see fig. 1). The title page, still protected by intact wooden covers and mottled with aged mildew, notes "Third edition—with additions." Someone cherished this book, and whomever these initials represent was not alone in treasuring her sentimental text. Owner writing survives in nearly all extant copies of this obscure narrative.

Lucinda and its reader history are intimately bound. It was up to a receptive audience to see Manvill's only published writing through seven more editions in New York, along with pirated versions in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Montgomery, Alabama. Lucinda's enduring popularity as a text ends up demonstrating not a clean-cut "progression" of nineteenth-century readerly tastes but the complexity of the early American genre of sentimental fiction and its audience. As owner evidence like the hair bracelets suggests, readers identified with Lucinda as a historical person even when the book appeared as a novel. The following study traces how readers continued to view Lucinda as fact in spite of later publishers marketing the text as exclusively fiction. This nineteenth-century reading practice complicates a too-pat analysis of the way novels changed across the century. For though later editions of Lucinda, at first glance, resemble other fictional narratives, the text originated as a historical account, demonstrating how American sentimental narratives not only provided entertainment but also exposed a cultural hypocrisy in the way a young Republic treated its poor and female citizens. Lucinda comprises an actual memoir of a large rural [End Page 285] family in 1806 upstate New York. This fact has far-reaching implications, even for the genres of American literary realism and women's regionalism. I will explore, in this essay, how Manvill's text works within and extends the boundaries of the sentimental tradition.


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Figure 1.

Hair mementos in an 1817 edition.

While owner signatures are not unusual for a nineteenth-century reading public, when one considers the history of Lucinda, this now out-of-print book becomes an atypical case indeed. The text seems rather predictable for a female author in 1807. Its events fit within the genre of the sentimental novel, more specifically what Nina Baym, in her groundbreaking study Woman's Fiction, has called a "novel of seduction," in which a poor young heroine succumbs to a worldly man then becomes pregnant and, abandoned and eventually destitute, dies after bearing her illegitimate child (26). Lucinda is not a nineteenth-century text even though its re [End Page 286] prints continue through 1868 with more than seven separate versions. In the nineteenth century, the heroines of Eve Sedgewick, E. D. E. N. South-worth, and Susan Warner—even Harriet Beecher Stowe's Eliza—triumphed over circumstance through marriage, financial gain, or some struggle in which they discover their inner worth. We see Lucinda's focus, revolving exclusively around a young woman's physical virtue, throughout American eighteenth-century fiction—in Charlotte Temple, The Power of Sympathy, and The Coquette; and in the plots and subplots of British and European precursors to American sentimentalism such as Eliza Haywood's Love In Excess, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Fanny Burney's Evelina, Madeleine de Scudéry's Clelia, and Mary Davys's The Reformed Coquette. What is remarkable about Lucinda is that all the events in Manvill's text are true. The title page itself attests to the book's position as memoir rather than novel (see fig. 2). "RECENT FACTS" jumps off the page in all capitals, italicized and vertically centered. Such a prominent line, also with larger font, speaks to its importance in understanding the author's (and, more likely, the printer's) intentions. Lucinda, as a...

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