"A Tale of Our Own Times": Early American Women's Novels, Reprints, and the Seduction of the Familiar

The early American novels reviewed in this essay offer an opportunity to reflect not only on how we teach such novels but also on which ones we teach and how they affect our students' understanding of the collective body of work we call early American literature. Twenty-six years after the launch of Oxford University Press's groundbreaking Early American Women Writers series with editions of Charlotte Temple and The Coquette edited by Cathy Davidson, those novels have long since moved past the recovery phase. For a good portion of today's professoriate, Charlotte Temple and The Coquette have always been available in modern reprints. With that sea change in the academy, full-service editions such as those published by Broadview and Norton were overdue; in these new editions, the novels receive the scholarly treatment once reserved for the works of canonical male authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Unfortunately, as editions of Charlotte Temple and The Coquette proliferated over the past twenty years, recovery work in women's novels slowed. It continues apace, however, with the publication of Sukey Vickery's Emily Hamilton and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Clarence.

Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794) will be well known to readers of this journal, and I begin there. Marion Rust's edition of Charlotte Temple includes all the features that one expects in a Norton edition. The novel proper, in the form of an authoritative text, occupies less than 100 of the 518 pages in this edition. The remaining 400-odd pages include the customary "Contexts" and "Criticism" sections. Although US readers made Charlotte Temple famous, Rowson wrote the book while living in England and first published it in London in 1791. Rust is attentive to the problems associated with calling Charlotte Temple an American book. Its British origins shaped both the novel's plot and its sentimental orientation. As Rust wisely explains, "The worst mistake we can make, then, is to call this an American novel and then retroactively impose all sorts of qualities onto it that weren't in existence at the time, such as a secure sense of national identity as distinct from the mother country." Consequently, Rust's contextual and critical selections help readers "parse out the novel's overlapping British and U.S. contexts" (xxiv). In the "Contexts" section, a subsection titled "Women in Early America: Intellect, Education, Sexuality" features contemporaneous British and American authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Benjamin Rush, as well as modern critics such as Nancy Cott. "Reading in Early America" similarly mixes contemporaneous and modern excerpts, which explore questions such as these: How and what did early Americans read? How did gender inflect reading practices? How was the novel perceived? Critics exploring these questions include Linda Kerber, William Gilmore, and Cathy Davidson. "The American Sentimental" excerpts novels, essays, and letters on that topic. The section "Selections from Rowson's Writings" includes the prefaces to five other novels as well as excerpts from her novels and her play Slaves in Algiers (1794). The "Criticism" section includes early reviews of Charlotte Temple by William Cobbett as well as essays by Jane Tompkins, Elizabeth Barnes, Julia Stern, and others. As the foregoing description illustrates, this is a fine, comprehensive edition—thoughtfully contextualized and grounded in important scholarship about sentimentalism, women's education, and reading practices.

For classroom...