Catharine Maria Sedgwick was the most famous and successful American woman fiction writer in the first half of the nineteenth century. During her lifetime, literary critics and historians routinely recognized her as a primary founder of a distinctly American literature, along with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Sedgwick’s close friend, William Cullen Bryant. Nevertheless, Sedgwick nearly passed out of literary history altogether before scholars began to reexamine her work in the 1970s and subsequently restored her to a place of prominence in criticism and the classroom. With modern scholarly editions of her novels in print, various selections of her fiction included in the major American teaching anthologies, essays …
3091 words
Citation: Elmore, Jenifer. "Catharine Maria Sedgwick". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 July 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3995, accessed 23 November 2024.]
