Historical Fiction Sedgwick, Catharine Maria: Hope Leslie. v1, 22 Dec 2016 2016

[AlexBell]

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was an American novelist and short story writer who wrote mainly "Domestic Fiction." Her work was popular from the 1820s to the 1850s, but by the end of the 19th century her work was hardly read. In the 1960s feminist scholars led renewed interest in her work.

She was born into a rich upper class Puritan family, and later joined the Unitarian Church. Her religious beliefs are often mentioned in her writings, including her acceptance of the beliefs of others, and of people of other races.

Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts was her third novel. It was first published nearly a century ago, and is set in New England about two centuries before then. It deals with the romantic and other relationships of Puritans and American Indians, including doctrines and their imposition on others. There is a satirical flavour throughout.

The text source was the 1827 White, Gallagher, and White edition through the Online Books page, and was checked against later editions and the Internet Archive. The source text used mainly British English spellings, and I have made this consistent. I have set letters and documents as blockquotes, silently corrected typos and archaic spellings, curled quotes, replaced italics, diacritics, and scene breaks, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

There are many references and allusions to other sources in the story, and I have provided annotations for some of them.

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