SOURCE: “Risking Reprisal: Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie and the Legitimation of Public Action by Women,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4, December, 1994, pp. 287-98.

In the following essay, Garvey assesses Hope Leslie as a text that dramatizes the pressures of female authorship in nineteenth-century America while also displaying the advantages of expanding women's responsibility for moral values in the public arena.

Writing on the cusp of nineteenth-century activism for women's rights, Catharine Sedgwick played a central role in legitimating the presence of women on the literary stage. As recent critics of nineteenth-century women's writing have noted, Sedgwick serves as a kind of “breakthrough” figure, an author who holds the distinction of standing near the beginning of a line of writers that would dominate the antebellum era. Nina Baym comments on Sedgwick's unique position by pointing out that “Sedgwick's career was not typical, … She achieved considerable prestige in her...