Catharine Maria Sedgwick enjoyed both critical and popular acclaim during her lifetime for her novels, short stories, sketches, and advice manuals as well as for her sole contribution to the genre of travel literature: Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841). Critics in her own day praised Sedgwick's use of American history, characters, and settings as well as her investigation of American manners, morals, values, and ideals, and beginning in 1822 with the publication of her first novel, A New-England Tale, they regularly listed Sedgwick as one of the founders of American literature, a group that included Washington Irving , James Fenimore Cooper , and William Cullen Bryant . Since Sedgwick's work was rediscovered in the 1970s most of the critical attention has been paid to her novels, especially the historical novel Hope Leslie (1827), reprinted in 1987 as part of the Rutgers University Press American Women Writers series, which deals with attitudes in...