SOURCE: “Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie: Radical Frontier Romance,” in Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier, edited by Eric Heyne, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 110-22.

In the following essay, Singley examines Hope Leslie as a frontier romance that offers an alternative vision of American women and culture.

Hope Leslie, published in 1827, was Catharine Maria Sedgwick's third and most successful novel. A historical romance set in the early colonial period, it centers on the adventures of a spirited, independent young woman, Hope Leslie, who energetically resists traditional conventions imposed by her Puritan world, yet who ends the novel in the most typical of ways, married to the young colonial hero, Everell Fletcher. Like many American novels of its time, Hope Leslie has a convoluted, somewhat contrived plot, with many doubling structures, cliff-hanging chapter endings, and narratorial intrusions. The novel primarily focuses on three issues: the friendship, romance...