Catharine Maria Sedgwick was considered by readers and critics of antebellum America to be a key figure in the establishment of the national literature. Her fiction is particularly American in subject and setting, and Sedgwick modestly considered her work to be a small contribution to the larger political effort of national improvement. As the author of six novels, multiple didactic fictions for adults and children, travel letters, and dozens of short fictions, Sedgwick seemed secure in her literary historical position. Years of derogation and misrepresentation in literary histories followed her death, however, and despite some earlier efforts, Sedgwick remained an out-of-print, literary footnote until the feminist movement of the 1980s. Since then, the high quality of her fictions (especially Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts [1827]), her wide-ranging stylistic and cultural interests, and the alternative ideological positions she espoused (regarding, for example, marriage and race relations) have...