Emily Hamilton and Other Writings, and: Lucinda; or, The Mountain Mourner (review)

The recent scholarly classroom editions of Sukey Vickery's epistolary novel Emily Hamilton and P. D. Manvill's memoir Lucinda; or, The Mountain Mourner add to the growing canon of available texts written by American women in the early republic. Various presses recently have begun to fill the gap left when Oxford's Early American Women Writers series and Rutgers's American Women Writers series stopped accepting new submissions. Although Kelroy (assumed to have been written by Rebecca Rush) has fallen out of print, Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism remains available from Oxford, and Broadview recently has published Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel and a combined edition of Leonora Sansay's Secret History and Laura. Now Vickery's Emily Hamilton and Manvill's Lucinda bring additional depth to this expanding constellation of recovered women writers by exploring their realistic concerns about living well in a period that was not favorable to women's material interests.

Scott Slawinski's edition surrounds Vickery's novel with her other literary productions, including the poems she published in the Massachusetts Spy and her previously unpublished poems, letters, and a significant diary fragment. Vickery's collected writings demonstrate a serious engagement with concerns about women's roles in the early republic. Regardless of what twenty-first-century readers may think of Vickery's "eighteenth-century aesthetics" and conventional iambic metrics, Slawinski notes that "one can see in her poetry an unflinching look at the world" (xxi, xxv). Throughout his scholarly introduction, Slawinski develops the compelling claim that Vickery's work "eschewed the sensationalism of her contemporaries and offered her readers in its place a carefully planned realism" (xxxv). Emily Hamilton, therefore, suggests an earlier turn than Nina Baym originally posited in Woman's Fiction "from anti-models such as Charlotte and Eliza" (in Charlotte Temple and The Coquette, respectively) to more realistic models of republican womanhood (xxxiv). Conventionally moralistic, but also designed to engage readers with material "founded on interesting scenes in real life," the characters found in Emily Hamilton are well educated and aspire to be "as happy as this life of imperfection will admit of" (4, 144). The protagonist, for example, dodges a potentially bad marriage to a man who has abandoned a former lover and child, only inadvertently to fall in love with a man whom she discovers is married. Such incidents place the novel within the realm of sensational seduction narratives; however, Slawinski points out that "a significant portion of the novel is dedicated to the illustration of her struggle to overcome her emotions." Thus, Vickery illustrates Hamilton's "inner mental and emotional strength, ultimately developing an early strain of psychological realism that matured in novels by antebellum women and Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as in those by Henry James" (xli).

Emily Hamilton, therefore, adds to our knowledge of early republican novels while opening lines of inquiry into established ideas about American realism and American women's writing. "What Emily Hamilton offers," Slawinski claims, "is an opportunity to reexamine the course of literary history: Is the novel the exception that proves the rule, or is it one among several that suggest the turn to model heroines occurs not in the 1820s but at least as early as 1803?" (xxxiv). Though Slawinski's reading of Vickery's novel skirts the edge of prolepsis, as when he imagines that "James probably would not ultimately have approved of Emily Hamilton," the idea that Vickery "prefigures Henry James in her dedication to psychological realism" is an appropriate assertion of the significance of the early decades of the nineteenth century and of American women's writing to our larger understanding of American literary history (xl). Charlene Avallone has argued recently that Catherine Maria Sedgwick's novels must be included with other exemplars of historical fiction, and Kathryn...