Martha Meredith Read was one of several early national writers who drew on the rancorous political imagery of the Federalist era. Her fiction, replete with references to the French Terror, the slave rebellion in St. Domingo, and the yellow-fever outbreak of 1793, expresses a conservative resistance to republican passions--a reaction consistent with her own patrician background. At the same time, however, Read's fiction displays a marked feminism and an awareness that human suffering is caused by many of the same institutions that enforce social order. Her work may thus be seen as a call to address some of the inequalities that surfaced in the early republic without sacrificing the elite dominance on which Federalists and old-line republicans had insisted. The fact that her second novel was published just as Federalist dreams were disintegrating points to the critical and experimental nature of her fiction.

Little is known about Read's life...