Catharine Maria Sedgwick – författare

A deluxe Harper Perennial Legacy Edition, with an introduction from Margot Livesey, award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy A compelling historical novel of two families wrestling with questions of honor, class, loyalty, democracy, and independence during the American Revolution, now available in a Harper Perennial Modern Classics Legacy Edition. In The Linwoods, Catharine Maria Sedgwick illuminates the American character and explores issues of civic virtue and national identity in the early republic, through the lives of two families: the Linwoods, dutiful loyalists, and the Lees, passionate revolutionaries. At the novel's heart is Isabella Linwood, a bright and independent young woman who will transform from a proud Tory to ardent Rebel, challenging not only British rule but its accepted social, economic, and political institutions, including the aristocracy, slavery, and patriarchal authority. This Legacy Edition features a lush design and French flaps.

Written in 1822, A New-England Tale is the first of Catharine Sedgwick's twenty novels published in her lifetime. It concerns the moral and religious development of a young orphan girl in rural New England, and provides an intriguing sketch of the social, political, and religious climate of early America, and of the methods of representation by early women writers. The editors' introduction locates the novel in its historical and political context, and provides a biographical sketch of Sedgwick.

Married or Single?, published in 1857, was Catharine Maria Sedgwick's final novel and a fitting climax to the career of one of antebellum America's first and most successful woman writers. Insisting on women's right to choose whether to marry, Married or Single? rejects the stigma of spinsterhood and offers readers a wider range of options for women in society, recognizing their need and ability to determine the course of their lives. Sedgwick's touching, witty, and shrewdly observant novel centers on Grace Herbert, a New York City socialite who must negotiate the marriage market and also learn to develop her own character and take control of her own destiny. The story merges a wide range of popular American literary forms—including the seduction novel, the conversion narrative, the novel of education, and social reform fiction—and provides a window on many of the cultural and political anxieties of the 1850s beyond marriage, including immigration, slavery, and urban poverty. Sedgwick's lifelong concern with women's duties to the nation as citizens is demonstrated through her depiction of exemplary women of various backgrounds and circumstances who illustrate the idea that becoming a worthy human being is more important than becoming a wife, especially in a democratic society.