SOURCE: “‘My Sister! My Sister!’: The Rhetoric of Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,” in American Literature, Vol. 70, No. 3, September, 1998, pp. 491-516.

In the following essay, Fetterley contends that Hope Leslie is a novel that examines and reflects the political, feminist, and ideological contradictions of its time.

Hope Leslie is arguably one of the most under-analyzed texts of nineteenth-century American literature. While sales figures from the Rutgers University Press American Women Writers series indicate its extensive use in classrooms across the country, and perhaps its interest for the general reader as well, scholarly and professional readings of the text have not developed proportionately.¹ This lag gains further resonance if we recognize that in little over a decade Sedgwick wrote five major novels—a fictional output equaled only by Cooper. Responding, like Cooper, to the call for a distinctively American literature, she rivaled him in her own day as the writer...