SOURCE: “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette and The Boarding School,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1992, pp. 185-203.

In the following essay, Pettengill analyzes the function of the circle of female friends in The Coquette and The Boarding School, asserting that the parallel plot involving what happens to this powerful group of women is equally integral to the novel as the seduction plot.

Much recent scholarship interprets the early American novel in light of complex economic and social forces that, in the wake of the Revolutionary war, transformed institutions ranging from the fledgling state to the family, along with the ideologies of class, race, and gender which supported them. Novels, and especially sentimental novels which focus on domestic dramas and interpersonal relationships, reveal the impact of these transformations on the American family, and more particularly, on American women who, more...