SOURCE: “Catharine Sedgwick's ‘Cacoethes Scribendi’: Romance in Real Life,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 4, Fall, 1990, pp. 567-76.

In the following essay, Fick examines Sedgwick's short story “Cacoethes Scribendi” as a protorealistic piece dealing with antebellum conceptions of literary realism.

Although Catharine Sedgwick was one of the most respected and popular authors writing before the Civil War, until recently she has been largely ignored by twentieth-century critics. In an 1835 review of The Linwoods, Edgar Allan Poe wrote that “of American female writers we must consider [Catharine Sedgwick] the first” (95), but after her death in 1867 she came to merit only passing references in literary histories and critical works. During the past few years, however, her literary reputation has undergone a minor revaluation, at least in part because her work shows a remarkable sensitivity to literary modes and conventions. Her first novel—A New England Tale (1822)—established the major...