Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s early letters document the intellectual development of a prolific woman writer from her childhood in the early national period through the 1813 death of her father Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist member of Congress and Massachusetts supreme court judge. The youngest daughter in a family of seven siblings, Sedgwick practiced epistolary conventions in her early letters while introducing her lifelong theme of balancing personal and family expectations with the obligation to write. As Sedgwick reported in her later autobiography, she felt that she lacked a satisfactory formal education, but “these great deficiencies” were offset by the quality of her homelife. Her adolescent years were marked by her mother’s chronic ill health and death in 1807, her father’s remarriage in 1808, and her engagement with her siblings’ growing families throughout the period. By 1812, as a 22-year old republican woman reflecting on her social position, CMS felt the call of a “life dignified by usefulness” and compared her father’s contributions to her own potential: “You may benefit a Nation my dear Papa, & I may improve the condition of a fellow being” (1 Mar. 1812).
Letters from Sedgwick’s pre-publication adulthood demonstrate her intellectual and religious development as she grappled with events both personal and national. Her siblings became the central focus of her domestic life, and the Sedgwicks’ experiences with “the market of matrimony” (15 Aug. 1813) provide intriguing fodder for epistolary debate. Sedgwick rejected at least two marriage proposals in her twenties, one in 1812 and another in 1819. In the summer of 1821, she traveled to Niagara Falls and Montreal and began keeping a journal. As Sedgwick developed her authorial persona and worked on her first novel, her full-throated dedication to family, female relationships, and personal usefulness emerged as primary concerns. Sedgwick’s letters also become more philosophical, and her lifelong dedication to republican service and intellectual Unitarianism come into focus. Sedgwick explains her sense of vocation to her lifelong friend Eliza Cabot Follen: “my ministry must be one of watchfulness and steady devotion, and all those cares that love teaches, and can pay without being asked” (15 Nov 1822).
With her first novel A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick established herself as a professional writer, and she published four additional literary novels and more than 30 stories during this period. As a dedicated family woman, who also chose to be single and an author, she constructed domestic arrangements that complemented her writing career. She lived in the homes of her brothers and sisters-in-law in Stockbridge, Lenox, and New York City, deepening her relationships with her siblings as well as caring for the children and contributing to their education. Redwood, her second novel, received “much more praise and celebrity than [she] expected” (18 Oct. 1824). As her fame grew, she continued to find her spiritual home in Unitarianism, while her range of acquaintances expanded to include artists, politicians, reformers, educators, and intellectuals. Sedgwick began to travel more widely, visiting friends in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, and making extended trips to Washington DC and the South. As a measure of her celebrity, she was selected for inclusion in the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (1834), the only woman included other than Martha Washington. The period was also punctuated by “the real and bitter sorrows that cloud our life” (13 Mar. 1830), including the deaths of her sister Eliza, her childhood nurse Elizabeth Freeman, and her brother Harry.
As a member of the American literati, Sedgwick navigated transatlantic fame while experiencing personal loss at home. She pursued new avenues of benevolent activism in her life and writings. Letters from this period will be available soon.
Sedgwick’s engagement with mid-nineteenth-century reform movements informed her writings during this period. Her primary residences continued to be New York City and the Berkshires. She deepened her relationships with her niece Kate Minot and other members of the next generation of Sedgwicks. Letters from this era will be available at a future date.
During the Civil War period, Sedgwick grappled with issues of national importance alongside personal losses at home. She published her last book and final story and, after a medical crisis, resigned as Director of the New York Women’s Prison Association. In her final years, she resided with Kate Minot and her family near Boston. Letters from this era will be available at a future date.
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I know I am indebted and doubly indebted to you for two letters & this being among the few of my debt to you which I could in some sort pay you may well think that before this time I should have attempted, at least, a liquidation thereof -- but I know you will not require one word in apology when I tell you that I have thought for the last fortnight that for the first time in my life I had some sympathy with your dreadful fatigue in Court time -- Of all the labors that ever I have undertaken, copying is the severest --
I have now nearly come to the end of my first volume & hurried -- I beleive I wrote to you, but I am not sure, that R. sold the copy right of an edition of 2000 to be printed uniform with Hope Leslie 1 for $1200 -- -- I am quite satisfied with romantic faults -- & because it has something not one of the
Dearest Charles I should make an apology to almost anyone else for all this about myself, but I consider whatever is my concern as just about as much yours -- I begin now to look forward eagerly to Kate's arrival -- I hope you will send her by the first boat that she may enter on her career in order to get through it sometime before midsummer -- I wish Elizabeth would have her plenty of pantelettes -- The most fashe mode is very full with a narrow band buttoned round the ankle & narrow ruffle below, but
I hear often from Jane -- and should go imme'y to Hartd
We shall all be very glad when the time come as for Eliz' visit -- I hope she will enjoy it with her usual zest -- I meant to have told you the story of poor Wharton Griffith's 2 discomfiture in Phia -- The G's have all
Tell my dear Kate she must take my
My love to Mary Pomeroy who I have just heard is at Lenox & to Mary Sewal & Charlie & Bess -- & beleive me dear Charles
Mrs Watts is pretty well again Robert goes to Stockbridge on Thursday
It has been raining here tremendously the whole evening the river must be open
Letter
Massachusetts Historical Society
Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers I
Wax blot, tears, worn creases and edges, smudges; the final paragraphs of the letter are cross-written in the right margin of page 1 and the left and top margins of page 1, the first PS is written on page 4; the second PS is cross-written in the right margin of page 3.
Charles Sedgwick Esqre/Lenox/Masstts
N Y March/1830
N Y March/1830
Sedgwick was working on her fourth novel, Clarence, published in two volumes later in 1830. Hope Leslie (1827) was her third novel.
Sedgwick is probably referring to the combined families resulting from the marriage of Arabella Griffith to Thomas Wharton.