Catharine Maria Sedgwick was the most famous and successful American woman fiction writer in the first half of the nineteenth century. During her lifetime, literary critics and historians routinely recognized her as a primary founder of a distinctly American literature, along with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Sedgwick’s close friend, William Cullen Bryant. Nevertheless, Sedgwick nearly passed out of literary history altogether before scholars began to reexamine her work in the 1970s and subsequently restored her to a place of prominence in criticism and the classroom. With modern scholarly editions of her novels in print, various selections of her fiction included in the major American teaching anthologies, essays

This article in full comprises 3093 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

First published 12 July 2005

Citation: Elmore, Jenifer. "Catharine Maria Sedgwick". The Literary Encyclopedia. 12 July 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3995, accessed 20 November 2009.]