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Hope Leslie: or, Early Times in the Massachusetts

Catharine Maria Sedgwick,

Carolyn L. Karcher (Editor)

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Sep 26, 2020 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction, classics

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) earned Nathaniel Hawthorne's praise as "our most truthful novelist." Many other writers and critics in her own day also had a high estimation of her work, and she was deservedly popular with the reading public, both in America and in England. But like many other Romantic-school writers, especially the females, she tended to be "dropped down the memory hole," around the turn of the 20th century, by a male-dominated Realist critical clerisy that had, among othe Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) earned Nathaniel Hawthorne's praise as "our most truthful novelist." Many other writers and critics in her own day also had a high estimation of her work, and she was deservedly popular with the reading public, both in America and in England. But like many other Romantic-school writers, especially the females, she tended to be "dropped down the memory hole," around the turn of the 20th century, by a male-dominated Realist critical clerisy that had, among other things, an agenda of largely purging women writers from the American canon. I wasn't taught anything about her in American Literature classes in high school or college, and it's a safe bet that most contemporary readers have never heard of her. That's a shame, because on the evidence of this novel she was as talented an author, and as worthy of reading, as most of the "canonical" writers of her day.

Hope Leslie (1827) was Sedgwick's third novel, and usually considered her best. It's historical fiction, set mostly in her native Massachusetts in the 1630s and early 1640s, though some of the early chapters are set in England as far back as into the 1620s, to explain the connection between the Fletcher and Leslie families. Written in the Romantic style, it's certainly influenced by Sir Walter Scott (whose work Sedgwick is known to have read and liked) and probably by Cooper as well. With a main storyline set in the aftermath of the Pequot War between the English settlers and the Pequot Indians, it focuses primarily on Indian-white relations --and the author's sympathies are solidly with the grievances of the former (though she doesn't deny, or condone, the fact that both sides were capable of atrocities), and against racial prejudice. Other themes are feminism (she has several female characters who display initiative, agency and even heroism, and depart from the patriarchal norms of behavior that were expected in the 17th -and 19th-- century) and the conflict between an approach to Christianity that's more concerned with the spirit than the letter of the law versus the much more rigid and legalistic orthodoxy of the Puritans. (Like Hawthorne, she respected and even admired the genuine virtues of the latter, and their contributions to America's democratic heritage, while recognizing and deploring "Their bigotry --their superstition & above all their intolerance," as she put it in a letter to the Swiss historian Charles Sismondi.)

This is not, however, a dry novel of ideas. On the contrary, it's a gripping page-turner, with an ably constructed plot that involves frontier warfare (one scene isn't for the squeamish, although Sedgwick spares us from as much of the gore as possible), Indian captivity, Puritan witch-hunting, daring rescues and escapes, concealed identity and cross-dressing, nefarious plotting, a romantic triangle --actually a couple of them at least, that interlock-- and, in the tradition of Hollywood action-movie blockbusters, before anybody knew what "movies" were, a colossal explosion. (It's probably owing only to Sedgwick's relative obscurity in the 20th and 21st centuries that this novel has never been filmed; but if a producer would ever discover it and have brains enough to do an adaptation that's actually faithful to the book, I think it would be a hit --I'd certainly watch it!) It also offers wonderful characterizations, with both good and bad characters who are believable and three-dimensional, an excellent depiction of female friendship, and strong moral messages. We should also add that Sedgwick's knowledge of New England history in this period is substantial and solid, and the research shows without being at all intrusive. Readers who can't stand 19th-century diction and occasional direct authorial address (some of it moralizing) to the reader won't like this; but those features didn't bother me in the slightest.

This Penguin Classics edition has a 30-page Introduction by literature and Women's Studies professor Carolyn L. Karcher of Temple Univ., which absolutely should NOT be read as an Introduction --it has plot spoilers galore! I read most of it after finishing the novel; and I'd advise readers to do the same with the whole of it. It would serve as a worthwhile Afterword, the strongest points being its discussion of Sedgwick's life and work up to 1827, the historical and literary context (although her claim that Scott created the historical fiction genre is a factual error; Daniel Defoe and Ann Radcliffe, just to name the first two writers who come to mind, preceded him by quite a bit!), and the reception of the work and comments on it by the public, other writers, and contemporary critics. (IMO, it's weaker where she tries to analyze Sedgwick's messages; there, I find her reasoning usually less convincing than she thinks, and I particularly find the treatment of interracial marriage here more positive than she does, though going into my reasoning would involve spoilers.) She also supplies about 26 1/2 pages of end-notes dealing with historical background, sources of quotations and allusions, etc., and appends a selected list, a bit over a page long, of other Sedgwick works; a roughly one-page bibliography of the sources she cited in the Introduction; and a three-page list of other suggested background reading. This includes primary historical sources by the likes of William Bradford and John Winthrop (who's an important character in the book), secondary histories, and a number of books and articles by other literary scholars, though none that I'm personally familiar with. ...more

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