SOURCE: Wilson, James D. “Incest and American Romantic Fiction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7, no. 1 (spring 1974): 31-50.

In the following excerpt, Wilson argues against critics who have faulted The Power of Sympathy for being too sentimental, claiming that not only is the novel unsentimental, but that it also anticipates thematic concerns that would become central to gothic American literature.

The first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature (1789), appeared in Boston as an anonymous work seemingly cast in a Richardsonian mold; dedicated to “the Young Ladies of United Columbia,” the novel ostensibly was “intended to represent the specious CAUSES, and to Expose the fatal CONSEQUENCES, of SEDUCTION.”¹ The novel's sentimental overtones and obvious indebtedness to the popular Samuel Richardson have led most critics to treat The Power of Sympathy as an historically important but intrinsically wretched example of the sentimental novel...