Hannah Webster Foster is the author of one of the best and most successful sentimental novels of the early national period. Attributed only to "A Lady of Massachusetts," Foster's The Coquette (1797) was one of the two best-selling American novels of the eighteenth century. (The other is Susanna Rowson's 1794 novel, Charlotte.) Thirteen editions of The Coquette appeared in the thirty years that followed its first publication, with its greatest popularity occurring between 1824 and 1828, when it was reprinted no fewer than eight times. An epistolary novel of seduction in the style of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-1749), The Coquette portrays the tragic life and death of Elizabeth Wharton, a strong-willed and independent young woman who finds herself in a dilemma faced by many eighteenth-century sentimental heroines: how to be true to one's heart and at the same time remain a respected member of the established social order. In the late twentieth...