Who Was Catharine Maria Sedgwick?

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) is the most significant, experimental, influential, and highly regarded woman writer of the Early National period of American literature. By the mid-1820s, Sedgwick was praised as the nation’s premier “authoress”; within the next decade her works had been republished in England and translated to French, German, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, and Danish. Always innovative, Sedgwick wrote in multiple genres (novel, short stories, sketches, didactic novella, biography, and travel) for various audiences (adult, juvenile, elite, and working-class readers), publishing twenty books and more than 150 short works. As a measure of her exceptional fame, in 1834 she was selected for inclusion in the first volume of the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, one of only four writers included and the only woman besides Martha Washington.

No other woman of Sedgwick’s generation had the cultural impact or artistic influence that she had. The Massachusetts-born Sedgwick traveled in the United States and in Europe, developing friendships with famous and influential people, and was not only sought out by other literary figures and public intellectuals, but also courted by reformers for her participation in worthy causes and the valuable endorsement of her name—all while she continued to publish in a variety of literary modes. But, while Sedgwick’s fame gave her access and influence in her lifetime, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, her reputation, like those of her female literary contemporaries, was effectively erased by the masculinist literary critical tradition in US universities.

The recovery of Sedgwick began in 1969, when Garrett Press reprinted two of her novels (Hope Leslie and Redwood), followed by Edward Halsey Foster’s short biography, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, in 1974. However, it was the groundbreaking efforts of the feminist recovery movement, in publications such as Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction (1978) and Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage (1984), that launched the contemporary recognition of Sedgwick as the first woman writer of her era, both in terms of chronology and significance. The repositioning of Sedgwick as an eminent author continued in 1987 with Kelley’s scholarly edition of the best-known novel, Hope Leslie (1827). Since then, scholarly editions of all six of Sedgwick’s major novels have been published. Many of Sedgwick’s short stories have been reprinted in various collections, and for the past three decades, her writing has reliably been included in college-level anthologies.

Recent scholarship has addressed the remarkable range of Sedgwick’s published oeuvre, but reconstructing American literary history to reflect Sedgwick’s manifold contributions as a writer, as well as her influence as a public figure, requires more scholarly infrastructure than currently exists. For this work, researchers need access to her letters, which, until this digital edition, had been primarily available only on microfilm or as originals in archives around the US and abroad. No full-length scholarly biography has ever been published, certainly due in part to the inaccessibility of Sedgwick’s letters. As scholar Carolyn Karcher contends, a fuller understanding of Sedgwick’s life and writings is crucial to the ongoing critical reassessment of American literary history; access to her letters is necessary to this effort.¹

Sedgwick’s first surviving letter was composed in the 1790s and her final letter in the aftermath of the Civil War, spanning eight decades of American life. Sedgwick corresponded with more than 250 individuals, including notable 19th-century figures such as writers William Cullen Bryant, Anna Murphy Jameson, Lydia Maria Child, Mary Russell Mitford, Harriet Martineau, Sir Walter Scott, Basil Hall, Charles Dickens, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; ministers William Ellery Channing and Orville Dewey; actresses Frances “Fanny” Kemble Butler and Sarah Siddons; close friends Eliza Cabot Follen and Susan Higginson Channing; educator Elizabeth Peabody, ambassador Henry Wheaton, Italian exile Gaetano de Castillia, and historian J.C.L. Sismondi.

Her correspondence is full of details about contemporary life; snapshots of her encounters with leading figures in the arenas of national and international politics, jurisprudence, education, religion, the sciences and the arts; as well as intense discussions of literature, philosophy, politics, and theology. Sedgwick’s letters illuminate her development as an author, providing glimpses of her intentions and possible sources, her interactions with publishers and reviewers, and her interrogation of the writings of her contemporaries. As with her published writing, her letters shed light on some of the most important socio-political issues of her era—gender roles, religious conflicts and revivals, courtship and marriage, economics and material culture, immigration, enslavement, Native American removal, and the environment—topics that continue to be of importance to both academic and general readers today.

¹ See Caroline L. Karcher, “Catharine Maria Sedgwick in Literary History,” Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, edited by Lucinda Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, Northeastern UP, 2003, pp. 5-15.